What introduced you to Neocities?

[TheNothingMonster]

I couldn't find a topic asking this question, so I decided to create one!

In case you are in the dark about what Neocities is, I suggest you read this. I would have explained it myself, though I reckoned the official info page would certainly be more accurate!

Here's my story with Neocities:

Back in 2020, I found a piece of fan art on DeviantArt which would catch my attention. I searched up the media it was referencing and I soon stumbled across the "Randal's Friends" (Ranfren) project by captainhowdie through the official website. If you have browsed Neocities for a while, you must have seen it somewhere.

Believe it or not, up until this point I had no interaction with static websites and this came as a total surprise! I used to use specific social media sites I liked the most and browsed the web for mainly art-related guides. In short, I was completely unaware of what I had stepped on.

As I engaged with the project, I gradually became a fan myself. I commented on captainhowdie's DeviantArt profile expressing my enthusiasm for the comics, including a side note asking how the website was made. I was lucky enough to receive a reply which went something along the lines of: «I used HTML and Neocities has some great tutorials for beginners». You can pretty much guess what happened afterwards.

This singular random comment had such an important impact on my life. Not only was the discovery of Neocities a fresh change, but also a provision for brand new skills that would help me to grow as an artist. I would have missed out on so many great things if it wasn't for all of this.

How were you introduced to Neocities? Did it made an impact on your experience with the web or life in any way?

[glitchlynx]

I found neocities through tumblr - specifically I was following a lot of webcore and weirdcore blogs, and I saw that a few of them had made websites on neocities for nostalgia / aesthetic. I decided to make my own, and I watched a few Khan Academy videos to learn basic html. For a while my site was just one page with a few pictures and a link to my own aesthetic tumblr blog. Eventually I found links to various webrings and fell down the rabbit hole, so to speak. I was already limiting my own social media use for mental health reasons, but realizing I could make a website to host my photography and other creative projects is really what convinced me to start deleting accounts. In otherwords, I came to neocities for the 'old web' aesthetic, and ended up sticking around for the 'old web' experience.  Discovering neocities definitely has had a positive impact on my relationship with the internet, and pushed me to learn a few new skills.

[wygolvillage]

My story is kind of boring, I had always been aware that Neocities existed since I had a few friends who had dabbled with it and stuff, and around the beginning of the year I saw a post circulating on Tumblr about making your own website that linked Neocities and some resources by people in the community, and I saw that post a few times (each time being like "well, coding a website is probably too hard for me...") before eventually just randomly deciding to check it out.

The funny part is that I don't even remember what made that time different and made me click on the tutorial links compared to all the previous times I saw the post... But it was a good decision

[bingus_baby]

Raining Starss!! The creator had some really good weirdcore playlists on YouTube that I listened to a lot. (Not just generic stuff, like actual good music.) I wanted to do HTML as a kid but never had a good chance to learn. I think I first found Neocities through petpetpet.neocities.org, but Raining Starss is what made me cave. I was sad to miss out on Geocities, so I did NOT want to miss this once in a lifetime chance!!! I only knew a few basic tags, but I got *marginally* over time!

[Azure]

like others in this thread, i also saw a post circulating around on tumblr that described why you should build your own website + linked neocities in the process! after that, i lurked on neocities for a WHILE until i finally felt brave enough to jump in and start creating whatever i wanted.

[Neonriser]

The earliest Neocities site I visited was about Scientology, what the believe, and how to avoid their influence, back in around 2015. I had no idea what Neocities was, but in hindsight it was actually hosted on Neocities because it had its name in the URL.

Several years later, I was studying the history of the internet when I came across Geocities. Upon further research, I have stumbled upon Neocities. Or so I thought: I am struggling to remember how I stumbled upon Neocities. Perhaps it was motivated by my drive to make a website. Perhaps it was motivated by 2000's online nostalgia. Or perhaps it was a combination of the two, but it was clearly the reason why I made my own site in the first place, back in 2019.

Before making my own site, I recall going around on Neocities sites a lot several months earlier. The notable sites I remember going to were https://fauux.neocities.org/, https://districts.neocities.org, https://castlecyberskull.neocities.org/, https://10kb.neocities.org/, and last but not least, https://melonking.net/!

[Y2KStardust]

like others in this thread, i also saw a post circulating around on tumblr that described why you should build your own website + linked neocities in the process! after that, i lurked on neocities for a WHILE until i finally felt brave enough to jump in and start creating whatever i wanted.

This is the post I found, also! I still use tumblr and other social media but I'm happy to have my own website and general 'place' on the small web ^.^

[Memory]

I'm actually quite unsure where I first heard of neocities.
I know that a year ago or two while trying to reinvent myself stylistically, I was reminded of the "scene" aesthetic of the early 2000s, and through that stumbled on SpaceHey. I already had some websites until then, but I was unaware of the web revival movement.

I think through SpaceHey I found... yesterweb? Or maybe some other site, not sure; and through that, Neocities and Melonland.

[e-]

Someone introduced me to the band Black Dresses and it was the first time I had the experience of being obsessively in love with a music group.
Before that I'd spent years longingly researching the cheapest domain names and not being able to afford 'em. So when I saw Black Dresses url as .neocities I was like "hey how'd they snag that one?" and I looked it up.

[vvinrg]

At some point, through one of the many internet oddity YouTube channels, I came across fauux.neocities.org. This was ages ago, and I never really did much with Neocities from that. I think I briefly explored it.

Later on, I got it in my head to make a personal website. I'd learned PHP/HTML/CSS/JS from good ol' w3schools a while before, for someone else's site, but had never made or put up a personal site. I rented my own VPS, and threw together the original homepage for my site. I wasn't a great programmer at that point, but I had a lot of fun making it. I eventually retired that design cause 1-pixel motion tends to look like flashing.

Sometime after site design 1, I discover sadgrl's page, and eventually decide I should probably have a Neocities. I made the little page that's up on my Neocities now, and haven't really touched it in a while. Since I already had the VPS, I hadn't thought of what to use the Neocities for, and I still really haven't. Everytime I want to make something, my instinct is to put it at XYZ.aleteoryx.me. At some point I'll think of some art project with the Platform, and that'll probably replace my current Neocities, but for now it's just a collection of links, blogposts proxied through replit, and HTML comments.

[Paprika]

This is the post I found, also! I still use tumblr and other social media but I'm happy to have my own website and general 'place' on the small web ^.^

And so did I lmao ! I was looking around to build my own website but I was full of doubts and very scared since it seemed rather difficult to do eveything. I clicked and never got disappointed since !

[tarraxahum]

Oh I am not at all original in seeing that one Tumblr post, huh! :D Although I believe there are actually at least two going around. The one I got was by the user psshaw, I still follow her and her website.

But yeah, her arguments were very convincing, and being deadly tired of most social media (I think I might've full on left most of it by that point) and kinda nostalgic for the reckless html-adventures of my childhood I got interested. And then I decided to host my comic on a website, and that's what gave me a push. (Ended up having two websites, one for the comic and one for myself  )

I mean, I was moaning left and right about the lack of personality and customization everywhere mere months before coming across that post. Was high time I put my actions where my mouth was!

[NeonAce]

I'd put up a small web site in the space provided by my ISP way back in the days of dial-up internet, and I'd had some friends that had put pages up on Tripod or Geocities back in the day too. We all played role playing games, so our sites were about that kind of stuff. Then, for some reason, personal web pages kind of died back for a while and things I'd share with my friends on a web site turned into maybe e-mails or shared Dropbox folders, things like that...

Anyways, in RPG-land, one of our favorite games was "Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game" which was released back in 1994/1995 by White Wolf. Sadly, the game was only out for a couple years before they stopped making it. White Wolf were most famously known for "Vampire: The Masquerade" and a bunch of other "World of Darkness" horror centered games, and later Exalted, etc. A little over a decade back the owners of the World of Darkness games started using Kickstarter to make "20th Anniversary Edition" fancy compilation versions of their game lines. Street Fighter, of course, was never going to get a 20th Anniversary Edition, due to both licensing and the fact that the whole thing really wasn't what their core goth-y horror fans cared much about. I was like, "This game is the best game White Wolf ever made. It deserves a 20th Anniversary edition!"

So, that's what led to me discovering Neocities. I was in a Google+ group and later a Facebook group dedicated to the game, and I told people that I was personally creating a 20th Anniversary edition, so I needed a place to put my in-progress PDFs and keep people up to date. I searched around and it seemed like a perfect fit. I managed to complete my 20th Anniversary PDF in September 2015, and keep the page up to make little updates about what people in the small Street Fighter RPG scene are up to, etc. Street Fighter Paradise!

[MrsMoe]

I found it through browsing google images, believe it or not! Basically, I went looking for a specific gif and ended up finding it on someone's Neocities site. After scouring through it, I started looking through all the other sites and thought "damn, this is something I want to be a part of".

[Memory]

I found out about Neocities years ago when searching the way back machine for my old GeoCities and AngelFire sites that I'd made in 2001. Oddly, I got a URL redirect to the same URL but with the Neocities domain and then I just found out more from there. I love the fact there is this web revival movement for webcore/legacy internet! I cannot tell you how long I've yearned for the old web to come back...