Off-topic: this is the first I've heard of neocities.org but I went there with high expectations and I'm positively impressed. I guess having been online for 20+ years makes me relatively "old" (many of those much older than my generation were not so keen to get online way back when) and by God do I miss the "old internet".
Neocities' description truly resonates with me:
> Neocities is a social network of 216,300 web sites that are
> bringing back the lost individual creativity of the web. We
> offer free static web hosting and tools that allow you to
> create your own web site. Join us!
My site is hosted by Neocities (who I support with a measily $5/mo) because I also miss Geocities and the "old internet". It's not that I couldn't have just picked any old host to serve static assets for me - but that it wanted to be a community of artsy/non-corporatized websites ran by hobbyists.
I was about to make a snarky comment, because it took me awhile to realize that you weren't talking about Geocities. I guess there's probably a connection:
Yeah its pretty cool. Its not just another free static web hosting but a place to find quirky bits of art and creativity unlike Git* pages which is just blogs and project pages.
There's nothing stopping you from putting "quirky bits of art and creativity" on a Git-host+static-site-generator site. Given that most of the Git-host web-apps have editing interfaces, there's not even a barrier to entry.
IMHO, it's mostly just that "you can freely host a static website on the same services programmers use to freely host source code" isn't a well-known thing outside of the programming community. GitHub/GitLab/etc. should do some outreach at the digital-art/interactive-media departments of universities.
The big big difference is discovery. Neocites has an explore page that shows you all of these mostly pointless personal pages and js games which often link internally to other neocities pages so you end up with a bubble resembling the old web rather than other static hosts that have websites that are just another blog in the modern commercialized internet.
That is really cool. One of the featured sites is an NES RPG fan page complete with a hand-drawn interpretation of the world map. It feels funny to describe a web page as "quaint", but that's the only word I can think of.
The first time I stumbled onto Neocities I also pined for the web as it was 2 decades ago and wondered if I shouldn’t encourage everyone I knew to put a site up there in hopes of spurring on a movement to change people’s tastes away from repetitively-polished-for-commercial-exploitation websites. Think it could work?
Neocities' description truly resonates with me: