Neocities and My Indie Web Dev Rabbit Hole
On January 1st, almost as if by divine intervention somehow, I discovered a free hosting site called Neocities. Well...that is kind of a lie to be honest. I had heard of neocities before via the "webcore" and "old internet" tags on tumblr, but at the time I was using carrd co very heavily and assumed neocities was too advanced for me to use (or maybe I was just too lazy to relearn html back then).
I don't really remember what I was doing when I first started my neocities adventure on the first of the year. Don't remember what the first site I clicked on was, I just know I discovered a few of the sites I clicked on had a "favorite sites" page that lead to other sites. I kept clicking and clicking and clicking and with every new website that I loaded up, the more inspired and filled with awe I become. Each page felt so unique and so personal. Every single thing added to each of these pages was added by an individual person with intent and purpose. On the night of the first of the year it felt like something clicked inside of me.
My Growing Social Media Disdain
I feel like I've witness 4 different internet paradigm shifts in my life:
♡ Once during 2011 - Nyan cat, trollface, and rage comic era. Terms like "memes" and "trolling" go mainstream.
♡ Once during 2013 - The birth of vine and the popularity of short form content.
♡ Once during 2016 - Huge internet political divide heavily influenced by the US election. Major rise in online political discourse. Rise in "cringe reaction" and "cringe complication" content. Overall growth in aggressive online behavior
♡ Once during 2020 - The year of more people being "chronically online" than ever before, and a great increase of people wanting to do "content creation" specifically as a source of income.
Everytime one of these changes occurred I felt....strange inside. Strange because I have been on the internet for a really long time. Many of the times I went online as a kid are core memories that I still recall to this day. I remember when I was very young that not many people used the internet or computers super heavily at all. In fact, it was considered very nerdy to like computers and video games and back then being nerdy was something people would make fun of. In those times when you met someone who knew about memes or other internet specific slang or hobbies it was like making instant friends. Not to mention the online friends I met during that time. Websites and forums for personal interests like niche movies and video games were very active, so anything you couldn't talk about with people who were none the wiser in real life you could talk about with people on different websites online.
I couldn't pin point why I felt so strange every time the internet changed at first, but as I grew older it started to become more clear: capitalism. I was slowly starting to get the ick because capitalism was starting to seep its filthy paws into something that felt like a personal hidden treasure to me for years before. I still remember the day I first saw the troll face being sold on t-shirts at the mall. It was being sold along side other internet slang that was catchy at the time like "U Mad Bro?" on t-shirts as well. Something about seeing that made me so irritated, but at the time I couldn't put into words why. My friends and family just brushed it off as me "acting like a hipster", so I thought that's what it was at first too.
Over time my ick started to grow stronger and stronger with each change. Then in 2020-2023 with the most recent web3 change that brought about the over saturation of content creators, NFTs, AI, broken algorithms, and Andrew Tate it really started to feel like the straw had broke the camel's back. Feels like everywhere I clicked and tapped someone was trying to sell me something whether it be real or fake. You cant even type certain words on twitter without being swarmed with bots. Its hard to even scroll facebook or pinterest without seeing ai art everywhere.
In addition many of the things that I simply liked to do for fun were things so many people around me were doing for money. I started to feel this peer pressure to make myself into a brand and started to make money and receive free items here and there from the things I just happened to do for fun. Over time, though, making yourself into a brand involves revolving around numbers and feeling like you're constantly working. After a while I found myself start to procrastinate dressing up, doing my makeup, taking photos, making videos, doing graphic design etc because it would give me anxiety. I would always feel this pressure that it had to be good every time or it felt like what I was doing was a waste of time.
In an interview the extremely popular and successful singer SZA talks about how she actually hates going to the studio because it gives her anxiety in a similar way. She talks about how songs she spends a lot of time and energy on aren't nearly as popular as songs she made when she was barely even trying. In this interview she encapsulates a lot of how I feel too.
Finally Leaving Cuckerberg's Cursed Ass App (one of them anyways...)
Hate to break it to yall but I really don't think I will ever reactivate my facebook ever again. I do not want to partake in community activity on there anymore either. Years ago my therapist taught me how to do something called a "behavioral chain analysis". This is when you identify a problematic behavior pattern that you want to get rid of and reflect deeply on the past events , environment, and vulnerability that lead to this behavior. After several extremely unfortunate circumstances occurred in 2023 that resulted in me no longer associating with people I considered friends for years (but were they really ever actually my friends? Maybe more on this in a different blog post) and a lot of my very heavy trauma resurfacing and being forced to the forefront of my mind I started to ask myself "what are the choices in my life and common denominators that led me to feel this much immense sadness". And so the the behavioral chain analysis began.
I started to ask myself things like "where did I meet all these people?" "what led to me considering us friends?" "what led to me feeling that I could trust this person?" "what led me to these communities that ended up hurting me and betraying me?"
It was the same answer over and over for many different instances and scenarios dating back years:
Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook.
Of course it's also important for me to acknowledge the part I play in my own down falls. It's important for me to not always "play the victim" and to take responsibility for my actions, my choices, and the environments that I chose to put myself in especially as an adult. A big part of this acknowledgement is what led me to therapy in the first place.
However during my reflection I started to really think about facebook and all the people in my life that I had met through that app/website. Pretty much all the people I've ever met that have traumatized me or done me dirty somehow were all people I met on fb. The way the website encourages interaction with its algorithms lures people into a false sense of friendship and trust. It can trick people into considering people who are merely acquaintances as friends through repeated mutual validation and shared interests. As I have grown up and gained more meaningful real life friendships, I have learned there's a LOT more to friendship than that. There's a surprising amount of people on Facebook (and online in general) who don't realize that, to a point that it kind of scares me.
In addition to the promotion of inauthentic friendships, facebook also heavily encourages doomer mentality. So many people, especially in the alternative community, consider it the norm to openly and frequently vent post and overshare extremely tragic/and or personal information. Something I have been guilty of before too. After consuming and partaking in it for years and and years it just.....finally become too much for me to be honest.
There are many people who think they know my exact motives for the things that I do because of their own conspiracies they make up about me and it's funny and sad to see. These are feelings that I've had and wanted to follow through on for a while, but there are many people in my life who don't use other social media or websites that I'd be afraid to lose contact with. After a lot of consideration and after being under just too much stress I decided my life would be better off if I just personally and privately reached out to them to catch up. Doing that would be a much better choice than staying addicted to a website that harmed my mental health for years, wouldn't you agree? I think it is better for both my mental health and for the mental health of the people in my life as well.
I Made My Own Website and Fell In Love With HTML & CSS Again
The same night that I fell down the neocities and yesterweb rabbit hole I decided to make an account and start making my own website too. At first I meant to just dabble in it for just a few minutes to see what I could do, but next thing I knew hours went by. I had entered a flow state for the first time in a long time. Making an html page felt like speaking a language that hadn't graced my lips in years. I used to spend hours configuring the html of my tumblr blogs as a teenager and doing it on neocities felt just like riding a bike again. Though, this time it felt a little different. This time it feels a little more special because I get to do it with my adult brain. There are so many things on other people's neocities sites that I had no idea how to do and still don't know how to do. Not to mention a new element I have never really dabbled with before: Javascript. There are so many things you can do with and add to websites that I had never really knew about or considered before, and now I feel so inspired to learn and try them.
There are so many things that I didn't realize that I am fully capable of learning how to that I am so excited to study and try now. It is hard not to feel bitter about all the years I spent that on facebook talking to toxic people with the wrong intentions and on tik tok just following trends and doing what I felt other people expected of me. It's not that I don't enjoy making "content". I genuinely do love playing dress up and entertaining people and trying to bring communities together and speaking up about what I believe in. I really really do. I just don't enjoy what making "content" has turned into these days. It feels sooo dystopian and facebook truly feels like the epicenter of all of my bad feelings about social media.
I have been saying for years that I missed people having personal blogs (especially jfashion blogs from the 2010s) and websites, and how I miss the height of tumblr popularity because of how different the culture seemed there (a big part of which I highly attributed to the profile personalization options both with desktop html themes and mobile colors and headers). Neocities is literally like my love of both combined. There is so much uniqueness and creativity. Even though the internet has felt hostile and dead since 2016 I am so happy to discover this community of people that want to keep the original values of the internet alive. The more I learn about the indie web, the small net, and about web development in general the more I feel like I'm starting to see the internet completely different.
The more I start to use neocities and learn the ins and outs of web development and design, the more I will share my feelings about them on this blog. I feel like this post is already long enough so I will end it here~♡
See you next time. Stay cute!!
P.S. if any of my old fb friends are reading this don't worry I'm still on messenger (っ´ω｀)っ
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2 comments
I agree on hating social media and that having to NeoCities is one of the best things that happened on the Internet. I had a Facebook account since I was in the 8th grade and used to like it as it was a great way to catch up family and friends. But it around was 2013 is when they added algorithm to their feed and I started seeing negative posts from just about everything, which brought my mood down. The 2016 election made it worst by adding political discourse and by the end of the year, I have (mostly) abandoned Facbook.
ReplyDeleteI used other social media accounts and didn't like them for various of reasons (one was Twitter, which I deleted in 2022 thanks to a certain person, buying the site). NeoCities is the only place I can feel comfortable since I can customized my pages and (mostly) get away from the discourse and capitalism that ruin the Internet that we knew growing up.
This hit SO close you have no idea!!! My childhood internet era was the early 2010's, and even that feels different to today's landscape, maybe it's because I fondly remember coming across my first exorcist jumpscare when asking for free Club Penguin memberships on some random chatroom, or maybe it's because I used to have a Club Penguin blog, but it felt different to doomscrolling :/ Ever since then I felt like online life was a constant -chasing the next trend to feel like you have an online community that shares your interests-, and let's not even get into the amount of wasted time scrolling through reels or tiktok that made me feel MISERABLE!!! I'm so glad that there's this little side of the web for us to interact with personal blogs and sites, now my daily routine (which at some point included countless hours on my phone doing nothing) includes surfing through neocities and interacting with all the cool pages I've found!! ♡⸜(˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝
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