Not having to learn Git to make a website, for one. Both my kids have a neocities website, github pages has an enormous barrier to entry compared to it.
Just google around, read some w3schools, type it into a textarea at neocities and woa, your own site.
Obviously this is only interesting for relatively nerdy types, but i don’t at all understand all the “why don’t people just <twenty cumbersome steps and tools>” comments that are here currently.
I know no place that makes having your own, self-built website, easier. And it’s free!
THIS! I've been maintaining a Neocities website for almost three years now. While, being a software engineer at heart, I still ultimately versioned the offline copy of my website via Git(lab), it's liberating to not have to wrestle with a git workflow just so I can hide my works-in-progress.
Also, in my case, a matter of branding. While I'm not trying to promote my content (a bunch of short stories and illustrations) so heavily, it just felt wrong for them to reside in Github/Gitlab subdomain. The closest I would've considered Git* pages is if I was doing sci-fi stories and that is still a "maybe". At the time I started my project, I was also worried I might run afoul of some content policy these Git platforms might have given that my website is not exactly for their demographic.
But now you need to understand what files are, what zip is, what “upload” means and how it matters whether a file is on your computer or on a server, and so on. With neocities you can just type HTML into a box.
Once you know how git/hub works, it seems much easier to me to use github, but I understand that not all people do; while all the other sites (squarespace, wix etc) are too much of "website builders". Fine thanks
Just google around, read some w3schools, type it into a textarea at neocities and woa, your own site.
Obviously this is only interesting for relatively nerdy types, but i don’t at all understand all the “why don’t people just <twenty cumbersome steps and tools>” comments that are here currently.
I know no place that makes having your own, self-built website, easier. And it’s free!