rambling: neocities review
Today (January 28th), I reached a milestone: I reached a hundred followers on Neocities.
While arbitrary measurements of success like followers do nothing to cultivate a positive relationship between an artist and their art - especially with followers, since eyes on your work does not equal engagement to it and to you, and not all attention is good attention - I’d be a total liar if I said seeing my funny little site hit triple digits didn’t feel nice. It does. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy thinking about my site going from Baby’s First HTML Page to a half-decent little personal site.
And like, as well, there’s this pessimistic part of me that laments about how despite working on my site for an extended amount of time, I never really did progress my knowledge of HTML beyond rather simple shit, experimenting for hours on end, and lots of Googling and sifting through Stack Overflow and Reddit for answers. That I fundamentally spent six months playing digital dress-up and that I’m an embarrassment to actual developers. What do you mean you don’t know how to implement a static site generator? Fucking poser. Shred your Bachelor’s degree. And it’s like, yeah, yeah. I know. I think I ought to do better. I constantly feel like a liar and horribly out of my depth when in the company of actual frontend devs (and why I left 32-bit Cafe - no slight on them, they’re great, I’m just anxious). But that’s okay - this is a hobby for me. I’ll be limited, sure, but with my site’s scope, I think it’s fine. Not to say it’s bad to keep learning, but keeping my expectations low helps with keeping my frustrations low, too.
Back on track: I think some funny celebratory things are in order - namely, more free-to-use graphics for use on the indie / personal web. But I also wanted to take a moment to give the host my site’s called home since one hot July afternoon a proper look over. A review of sorts, as a hobbyist that’s used it for a while now (I’ve been on Neocities since before Fatgrrlz - I made a funny gallery with some Destiny fanart I made while trying to decompress from my very stressful capstone project while in college - it looked boring (I was literally just emulating the web design of various fashion designers - the drab black and white minimalist digital platform to serve funny images of sparkly dresses), but it was fun).
From a layman user using a static host standpoint, I think the site does what it’s supposed to. It hosts static pages. Having to clear your cache when you update to see if anything’s broken is a pain in the ass, but I’ve found that opening your website in an Incognito tab works as a workaround. The 1GB size limit has been fine for me so far, though those that are hosting large images (ie fellow artists) may want to consider hosting them elsewhere to avoid hitting the limit if you’re not interested in decreasing the quality or using .webp’s to shrink their file size (putting in a reminder to myself to convert my larger images to that…).
I think the on-site site file manager kind of sucks. You can only manage one file at a time, making deleting multiple files at a time a pain. Oftentimes it’s very slow to navigate as well, making sites that have very nested directories a slog to update. The editor itself is serviceable, though I feel regardless of how good it is, I think more folks should be aware of local code editors to develop good coding habits (ie having backups in case you need to roll back changes). I like the drag and drop option but sometimes it bugs out, mainly if you upload multiple files at a time or drag in a folder with files inside.
Neocities is particular about file extension capitalization, so a file that ends in .png will not appear if the HTML says it’s .PNG - probably one of my biggest issues with updating my site.
I think the social and discoverability aspects of Neocities kinda suck - though at the same time, due to many old web practices Neocities sites have taken on (ie buttons & sharing sites on their website, commenting on guestbooks and chatboxes), it’s comparatively a nonissue. For many, the whole point of Neocities is to rid themselves of social medias. You’re supposed to discover people’s websites through exploring pages - finding site buttons, sifting through webrings, it’s intended to be slow and organic, not fast and algorithmic. You can even opt out of the social aspects of Neocities proper in the account settings. It could even be argued that Neocities’s social aspects being shit is the literal point - to stop you from trying to treat Neocities as a not-like-the-other-girls Twitter and just use it as a site host. Which, at that point, why have the social media parts at all? To coerce zoomers into getting into the indie web by way of drip feeding them “familiar” social media aspects that are just terrible enough to turn them away from using them? I fuckin’ guess.
Regardless - I’m going to assume that the social media parts are there in earnest and just suck, and write about some potential ideas for improvements.
Websites Section
Neocities’s Website section is a literal meme for how utterly dead it seems. I think the first problem is that it defaults to Most Followed - it (and the Featured sort) both have issues in that most of the sites listed haven’t been updated in years with their webmasters having long abandoned their sites. Not to mention those who are active are wracked with a degree of digital clout, in a way that dehumanizes the person behind the site as “one of the big guys”. One of the most apt examples of this is Sadgrl’s description of how being capital t The most popular page on Neocities is like in her updated manifesto:
As a brief aside, it brings me much 'ick' to acknowledge that my website is at the top of Neocities "most followed" sites. This was my experience being 'parasocialed' against my will: what started as a spotlight on my space quickly started feeling like a target on my back. Because I have amassed thousands of followers, I have apparently somehow become less human, less approachable, and more easily abstracted into an idea or a concept. It's easier for people to wonder aloud about me and my personal life in social spaces, or to publicly cast judgment on my actions, or in some cases, create untrue stories about my actions to begin with. It's an intensely unpleasant and dehumanizing experience.
Like, I don’t like Sadgrl for my own reasons, but I empathize all the same as someone who also helmed popular accounts online in the past. Shit sucks! At a certain point in popularity, your personhood is revoked from you. And it begs the question: why is it, on a platform whose whole thing is moving away from the ideals of typical social medias, we end up repeating those very same ills? That even in this “indie web” environment, we’re still stuck in this game of numbers as status symbols and clout? The website list page, in its current state, only further contributes to that numbers game that so many have come on Neocities as an escape from.
I think a simple solution, before diving into algorithmic messes to make it “fairer” for more active sites (though at the same time - maybe some sites are okay with just being left as-is for years on end, not everything needs to constantly be shiny new), is to just make the Last Updated option the default sort for the Websites page. As a default sort, it removes the prestige of digital clout of being “the most followed” to anonymous visitors checking out Neocities in favor of just showing whatever’s currently being worked on. Yes, this does open the potential for abuse, but I think Neocities’s handling of one-update-per-day kind of works as a band-aid for that abuse. Plus, I think it supports the core idea of Neocities - that being, a “return to form” in having and maintaining your own website, and moving away from how clout-driven “typical” social medias are.
User / Site Pages
In regards to site pages, I think there is room for improvement.
One of the larger complaints I’ve seen is that it’s a pain to manage the activity section. The way webmasters use it depends on person to person - some use it strictly for updates, others use it to discuss their site and plans with it in general, and some just use it as an alternate, shittier Twitter.
I think there could be the option of having a dedicated change log section, separate from the activity / comments section. While many users have actual change logs on their site proper, some - like me - use the activity page as a “running” change log on the activity page of their user page where we make brief comments describing what was changed on the site. I think the caveat could be that people can comment on updates in the comment/response section, whereas the change log is solely for changes made to the site. Give users following a particular website the ability to filter out comments, so that they can decide if their main activity page should be inundated with funny haha meme posts or solely updates, no fluff needed. I think nested comments and replies could be useful as well for discussions.
In relation to profiles: I think there should be a de-emphasis of the numbers game and more of an emphasis on the actual websites themselves - it is what makes Neocities, Neocities, after all. The number of Views/Followers should be relegated to a sidebar in smaller text, hidden in a page only accessible by the webmaster, or just hidden entirely a la Tumblr. In its place, webmasters could provide a brief summary on what their site is about, and maybe enable them the ability to share up to three other Neocities profiles/sites of their choice. This also helps in discoverability in that users that stumble across your site could check out other sites in addition.
I think having content-related flags on the site profile could also be useful on the profile side of things. Stuff like “responsive design / desktop only”, “18+ content”, “epilepsy warning” can inform visitors previewing the site from the profile page of potential issues that may arise when entering or navigating their website. Sure, the opt-in nature of this may make it rather ineffective (plus, people that ignore it outright by going to the site directly), especially for sites that haven’t been updated in a long time, but I think having the option could be beneficial for those browsing Neocities. I’m also not sure how it could be implemented in a way that can’t be abused, ie a site saying it’s responsive when it is not.
I think a similar, more fun opt-in option for user pages that could even be monetized is the use of profile badges. Account age badges are a given freebie (ie those Steam badges that say X years), but also - being able to spend, like, idunno, fifty cents or something to gift a user a badge because their site is really cute, or they Just Like That Site or some shit. The badges shouldn’t have any meaningful impact (outside of being another avenue of giving money to the site), but if there’s something I’ve learned from Reddit (and Tumblr, Twitter et al), it’s that people love spending money on useless shit, so why not. It’s not something I’d spend money on, but I know of more than a few that would. Again, I could see this being an opt-in option where people who don’t want it, don’t have to have it. Yeah, it’s stupid, but as far as I can tell nobody really takes them seriously elsewhere. Fuck it, why not.
That’s all I can think of currently. I imagine I’ll be able to think up more later.