Blaugust 2022 – What is Neocities?
Posted on August 20, 2022 by Aywren
If you’ve been around my blog, you’ve probably heard me sing the praises of Neocities for the past few years. For those familiar with the old web, the name “Neocities” likely makes you recall “Geocities” (and probably fondly). That’s because Neocities is a spiritual successor to the old web Geocities in much of what it does.
Neocities is a FREE webhost that seeks to break away from route social media and return the creativity of the old web to the Internet. Users are encouraged to design and hand-code their own personal websites however they see fit, which results in lots of unique and unusual places to visit.
All free accounts get one website with 1 G of space and 200 MB of monthly bandwidth. This might not sound like a lot, but when you’re talking plain HTML pages, they really don’t take a whole lot of space.
There are no advertisements on anyone’s webpages. Neocities is completely run by Supporters – folks who choose to pay a $5 monthly sub for lots of great perks and fairly cheap hosting as far as it runs.
Neocities is much more than just a webhost, however. There’s an optional social media backend to the site that helps to connect old web enthusiasts and build a community. You can’t see everything that’s going on behind the scenes unless you have an account, but folks can follow sites they like, see when those sites update, and even leave comments and likes to support each other.
You can also surf sites from the directory, see who has recently updated, and search for sites based on tags that the creators assigned them. It’s a great system for finding and exploring something new every day!
I’ll go more into both the social media bits of Neocities as well and the perks of being a Neocities Supporter in future posts. For now, know that you’re getting a lot more than just a webhost if you choose to use it to connect with other website builders.
Alongside that, Neocities has an unofficial reddit and Discord. There is also a Mastodon instance run by one of the more well-known Neocities community members.
In fact, Neocities is far more active than you might think! New sites are always popping up, current sites being updated, comments and likes being left, conversations going on. The Discord is quite active for sharing sites, finding resources, and asking for HTML help, too.
If you’re interested in seeing what Neocities is about, sign up for a free account. That’s all there is to it! There’s even a tutorial on how to learn HTML for those curious but with no experience!