It is weird that neither About, nor Terms or Contact pages mention who actually is behind this project. No name, no clear legal status, but collecting money and personal data of users. It may be a well-known service, but the number of users does not make it more trustworthy.
Doesn't strike this USian at all as weird. This describes most online entities that I interact with. Plus, there's always the site's contact form that you can use to ask for the information you want.
What makes me trust it a whole lot are this triplet of facts
1) AFAICT, neither their privacy policy nor their terms of service have been changed in more than a decade.
2) They do not require you to give up your right to access the courts in order to use their service.
Have to be honest, while I like the concept of these services, I've never really found the motivation to use them. If I'd came across Neocities in the 90s or 00s I'd have been all over it, but it's hard to justify today when I'm already paying for web hosting elsewhere. It's like, if a more powerful solution exists elsewhere, I struggle to work within the limitations of a more restrictive one.
You're not the target audience. My son is 13 and has his own website, started to learn HTML when he was 11. All I did was tell him about Neocities (and allow him to sign up) and he figured out the rest.
This is very similar to how I started out almost thirty years ago. Static files, a complicated JavaScript navigation, maybe even entirely flash based! Not everyone needs a hyperscaler!
awww geocities how much have world changed since, it was an era of stranger danger don't get in strangers car world. It was about connection online however, no matter who they are, post your corner of the world online for all to see, hoping to strike up some connection. It was about tiny pictures, midi files because we have no bandwidth. We were optimistic, eager, and already had to filter out the paedophiles by pretending to be a 60/f/china. I miss the era for sure, the optimism especially, we truly believed internet would bring so much progress, world peace wasn't even that far away even.
Mods were useful to share music mafe with samples, however midi files could be played on a browser and were thus more common as asset for a website although nearly everybody hated it when a website would automatically play a midi file.
Neocities is one of the few websites I go to restore my faith in the future of the internet - it's the healthiest online creative community I've come across!
You can host arbitrary files on it but Neocities isn't really intended as a file host along the lines of Dropbox. It's more for hosting general-purpose web sites.
If only a cynical Frenchman had written a book critiquing peoples' tendency towards simulating things that don't exist.
Neocities is cool, but the medium is the message and we've generally moved on from this (treasured!) past. Any attempt to replicate it tends to wind up hyperreal and forced.
Not sure about <blink>, but I sampled a few random sites from their gallery[1] and all of them have <marquee>. <marquee> is deprecated[2] and no longer scrolls in Firefox, but still works in Chrome.
Neocities just hosts web sites. It's up for the author of the site to write a page with <blink> (if they really want to), then for the browser that visitors use to visit that site to implement its functionality. The web host has nothing to do with it.
It is weird that neither About, nor Terms or Contact pages mention who actually is behind this project. No name, no clear legal status, but collecting money and personal data of users. It may be a well-known service, but the number of users does not make it more trustworthy.
You can find lots of articles online about its founder. He’s even on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445181
> It is weird that...
Doesn't strike this USian at all as weird. This describes most online entities that I interact with. Plus, there's always the site's contact form that you can use to ask for the information you want.
What makes me trust it a whole lot are this triplet of facts
1) AFAICT, neither their privacy policy nor their terms of service have been changed in more than a decade.
2) They do not require you to give up your right to access the courts in order to use their service.
3) The backend code is open source.
I absolutely love neocities, I use it to host my goatse mirror (goatse.live).
A friend of mine wanted somewhere to host goatse for random QR codes he’s planning of sticking everywhere. Problem solved :)
Have to be honest, while I like the concept of these services, I've never really found the motivation to use them. If I'd came across Neocities in the 90s or 00s I'd have been all over it, but it's hard to justify today when I'm already paying for web hosting elsewhere. It's like, if a more powerful solution exists elsewhere, I struggle to work within the limitations of a more restrictive one.
You said it yourself: you're already paying. Lots of people don't want to pay, so they use this for their hobby.
You're not the target audience. My son is 13 and has his own website, started to learn HTML when he was 11. All I did was tell him about Neocities (and allow him to sign up) and he figured out the rest.
This is very similar to how I started out almost thirty years ago. Static files, a complicated JavaScript navigation, maybe even entirely flash based! Not everyone needs a hyperscaler!
awww geocities how much have world changed since, it was an era of stranger danger don't get in strangers car world. It was about connection online however, no matter who they are, post your corner of the world online for all to see, hoping to strike up some connection. It was about tiny pictures, midi files because we have no bandwidth. We were optimistic, eager, and already had to filter out the paedophiles by pretending to be a 60/f/china. I miss the era for sure, the optimism especially, we truly believed internet would bring so much progress, world peace wasn't even that far away even.
To get a hint of the backdrop.. https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/1993-rabin-and-ar...
I remember .mod music files more than midi
https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...
Mods were useful to share music mafe with samples, however midi files could be played on a browser and were thus more common as asset for a website although nearly everybody hated it when a website would automatically play a midi file.
One of my personal faves on that site: fauux.neocities.org
Hah, I was just deep diving into Serial Experiments Lain. Cool site!
Neocities is one of the few websites I go to restore my faith in the future of the internet - it's the healthiest online creative community I've come across!
Can i add software for people to download?
It seems dropbox is the only free solution but they make it look like you need to register to download (Dark pattern?).
You can host arbitrary files on it but Neocities isn't really intended as a file host along the lines of Dropbox. It's more for hosting general-purpose web sites.
If only a cynical Frenchman had written a book critiquing peoples' tendency towards simulating things that don't exist.
Neocities is cool, but the medium is the message and we've generally moved on from this (treasured!) past. Any attempt to replicate it tends to wind up hyperreal and forced.
Does it even properly implement the <blink> tag?
Not sure about <blink>, but I sampled a few random sites from their gallery[1] and all of them have <marquee>. <marquee> is deprecated[2] and no longer scrolls in Firefox, but still works in Chrome.
[1] https://neocities.org/browse
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
> <marquee> is deprecated
For some reason the Indian government LOVES marquee, to the point where it's almost a hallmark. Looks like marquee...finds a way.
[0] https://www.mygov.in/
[1] https://www.mea.gov.in/
[2] https://ociservices.gov.in/onlineOCI/
[3] https://www.passportindia.gov.in/psp
Neocities just hosts web sites. It's up for the author of the site to write a page with <blink> (if they really want to), then for the browser that visitors use to visit that site to implement its functionality. The web host has nothing to do with it.