Neocities kinda sucks, but it's still kinda good.

[debleb]

I mean, that's how nearly all big social networks grew to the size they are now: being shepherded by people who cared about it and people like it, until eventually they were either sold off or changed direction to add all of the bad things once people were hooked enough.

You could very well imagine Neocities going freemium to "cover server costs" at some point, with free sites getting a little ad banner at first, which gradually goes on to mean "premium features" like custom Javascript or unlimited upload size... you get the drift. This is plausible.

Neocities is cool, yes, but it's also a single point of failure that holds an entire subculture hostage at the moment. If it fails in some way, we're all gone; except for the few of us who self-host.

this is definitely a worry i have! especially considering that when there aren’t really good alternative free services and a lot of people won’t move to a paid one or self hosting (or at all.) it really is a bit of a monopoly. for now however they’ve not done any of that and it doesn’t look like they will in the near future at least.