Nekoweb vs Neocities or.... both? Are we moving? Mirroring?

[Malice]

I moved from Neocities to Nekoweb awhile ago, at the time it was partially because of the owner (which I now no longer really care about as much honestly, like yeah it sucks, but I feel like I blew it a bit out of proportion) but now it's mainly due to how nice the page editor feels (I used to have to break up some pages on Neocities if there were too many lines of code due to horrible lag, which made maintaining Archivescence a bit more tedious. Nekoweb doesn't have this issue!) and I could upload any filetype for free, which is also great for the archive since I had a few .bmp files that I couldn't put on Neocities. I actually ended up moving to the paid tier after a while, partially due to getting close to the file limit and because I wanted my sites under one account, and overall I think it was a pretty sound decision!

I have considered mirroring to Neocities again since I sort of miss that community, but oddly enough I've felt less pressure to update my sites consistently due to the lack of social features and how it takes a few more clicks to see site stats and follower count and such. I will say, Nekoweb's Discord isn't all that great and I'm not a fan of how it's basically the only way to get tech support/community. It's kind of a cesspit in there, so I'm staying out until I need help with something. I also just don't like the concept of Discord as tech support when forums exist! It's easier to redirect someone to a forum thread where their situation has been solved already than repeating yourself, but I digress.

I think the Neocities vs Nekoweb debate can be solved by asking yourself what you're doing for your site, which host will suit your needs better, and, if you're willing to pay, what paid tier features benefit you. File-heavy sites may benefit from Neocities' lack of file limit and larger free storage, but may have to take code editor lag and lack of uploading certain filetypes for free into account. Blogs may benefit from Nekoweb's RSS feed, but may have to take the lack of site comments into account. Some may prefer the social features of Neocities, while others may prefer Nekoweb's lack of them. I always suggest giving both hosts a try before settling on one or deciding to use both.

[lakes]

I have considered mirroring to Neocities again since I sort of miss that community, but oddly enough I've felt less pressure to update my sites consistently due to the lack of social features and how it takes a few more clicks to see site stats and follower count and such. I will say, Nekoweb's Discord isn't all that great and I'm not a fan of how it's basically the only way to get tech support/community.

I think the Neocities vs Nekoweb debate can be solved by asking yourself what you're doing for your site, which host will suit your needs better, and, if you're willing to pay, what paid tier features benefit you.

As someone who also recently switched to Nekoweb, I agree with this sentiment. Both web hosters and communities have their ups and downs. I decided to host a mirror of my site on both Neocities and a self-hosted version over this peer to peer network known as I2P.
I was originally gonna self-host over I2P exclusively out of fear that AI would scan my website in spite of my robots.txt. But just when I started thinking about it, there was sybill attack on the network from someone testing out a piece of botnet software known as Kimwolf.
I do think Nekoweb has better built-in code editors than Neocities. The main pro to Nekoweb for me is the default protection against AI. So far, I have been trying to set it up so that an iframe of my Nekoweb site causes my Neocities pages to update my profile feed using code from a friend. But I kinda can't seem to get it to update my feed. I know it's not my friend's code itself because he switched from Neocities to self-hosting & still uses Neocities for a mirror of the site. So I must've not copied it perfectly. Another thing I noticed is that a large of portion of Nekoweb feels younger? which isn't a bad thing, but on Neocities, I had an easier time finding users my own age. I personally prefer self-hosting over I2P to either of them, since I have more control over the site itself, but I can't have it up all the time and I2P sometimes gets hit with attacks to the network. So I have the site on both as a compromise.
I refuse to touch Nekoweb's Discord because it gives me a similar vibe to using Discord for Linux communities: I'd rather not rely on a proprietary corporation to interact with community-driven or open source projects. It kinda defeats the point to me. Plus I don't like the communities on most public Discord servers.
I agree that it'd better if Nekoweb had a forum. Even if they wanted something still chat-based, they could have a shoutbox like here, have an IRC channel, an XMPP chat, or even a Matrix room, or one of the plenty other alternatives to Discord.

[sunnyp4rk]

I've long flew off from using Neocities or Nekoweb, but for a while, I did switch to Nekoweb. Gotta say, while I didn't think about it at the time, looking back, it was more...peaceful, not having constant activity front and center when I logged onto my dashboard. That's actually a big reason why I moved off of Neocities for good back in October, since it felt like you CONSTANTLY have to update your site. But that's how I feel about it all. I would recommend Nekoweb if you just want a site to put your site on, and not interact with others lol

[ocean]

I use both Neocities & Nekoweb and my honest take is that Nekoweb is the better option. I have a few reasons for this stance. Firstly and most importantly, I think we all stand to benefit greatly if the indie web isn't centralized into a single location like Neocities. I'm not saying Neocities is bad by any stretch, but google could roll up with a check and buy the whole thing out tomorrow and then thats another library of Alexandria burning situation like we had with Geocities. For this reason I think Nekoweb is the better choice, in interest of decentralizing ourselves more.

Secondly and much less importantly, Nekoweb is cuter and has more personality! And cats!

[Daniele63]

I've moved all my websites out of Neocities to a VPS I'm renting, I still keep my profiles on neocities but they are redirecting to my VPS, the previews still show the websites because it's embedded in an iframe. I'm glad I bought a domain name early on so that the people who linked to me still have the correct URL, instead of a neocities subdomain.
Been thinking of running my own server but not experienced enough with it to prevent things like ddos prevention and doxxing, so that will have to wait for now.

[heckhound]

What are the creators stances on NSFW? /genq because I intend to have a NSFW alt site for my kink art, hence the reason I prefer Neocities over Nekoweb. I am considering making a lil side project for myself on Nekoweb just as fun, but I am not sure what that project is yet, so I want to start on my main site first and then check out Neko :>

[lakes]

What are the creators stances on NSFW? /genq because I intend to have a NSFW alt site for my kink art, hence the reason I prefer Neocities over Nekoweb. I am considering making a lil side project for myself on Nekoweb just as fun, but I am not sure what that project is yet, so I want to start on my main site first and then check out Neko :>

I'm not sure about the culture surrounding it yet because I'm new. But it you can set your site to "NSFW" under Site settings. So they might be accepting of it.

[heckhound]

Good to know thanks!
But the specifications of what is/isn't allowed for NSFW was the deal breaker for me, since a lot of my kink art focuses around quadruped/feral subjects. I just wouldn't want to chance it, since it seems they have stipulations about fiction unfortunately :s

[solaria]

I have one site on Neocities and one on Nekoweb, I like both and think they're very comparable.

I use Nekoweb for my rainbow site because it allows SSIs (server side includes) which makes inserting a consistent navbar easy. Being able to customize your site box is pretty cool and fun (although difficult to figure out how to use an image in the CSS, I had to join their discord server for a few minutes to figure it out, which was irritating. Stuff like that should be available on a public facing page, especially for people who don't have discord or want to detach from it).

Some people don't like Neocities social features, which is understandable, but I actually like them. I like being able to follow peoples sites and comment on them. And I like how their website explore page mixes up everyday rather than just being the most followed sites.

Kyle Neocities' stance on AI makes me roll my eyes, but it seems he recognizes many people who use his host don't like it. I saw hints of discontent over how NSFW is handled on Neocities but I don't think Nekoweb is any better in that department. If you go into site settings there is a NSFW content checkbox which says exactly: "This site contains NSFW content. When enabled, your site will not be accessible from UK." I'm not sure if that just means UK users who have a Nekoweb account, or any UK visitor. My rainbow site does not have any NSFW or even anything remotely suggestive, so thats not a problem for that site, but I don't think its a good place to host NSFW/kinky/suggestive/questionable art.

Its definitely easier to find other personal sites through hosts like Neocities and Nekoweb, but if you're not interested in that, you can gain some more freedom through other (and cheaper) hosts, such as Nearly Free Speech which I saw someone already mention ^^

[arcus]

Neocities is open source and self hostable. If anyone wanted to run their own copy of Neocities they could.

What are the creators stances on NSFW? /genq because I intend to have a NSFW alt site for my kink art, hence the reason I prefer Neocities over Nekoweb.

Neocities is based and operated in the USA and wants to support freedom of expression as much as possible within USA law. They made a blog post in August clarifying what they allow, but I can't find it. The main thing to note is that they ban porn (as in photography) but allow art. Note that if a site is tagged as NSFW, it will not appear under the activity feed nor the search page.

Nekoweb is subjected to US and German law. The site originally banned all NSFW, but it eventually allowed it. Nekoweb's ToS is stricter than Neocities'.

If you go into site settings there is a NSFW content checkbox which says exactly: "This site contains NSFW content. When enabled, your site will not be accessible from UK." I'm not sure if that just means UK users who have a Nekoweb account, or any UK visitor. My rainbow site does not have any NSFW or even anything remotely suggestive, so thats not a problem for that site, but I don't think its a good place to host NSFW/kinky/suggestive/questionable art.

It's because of The Online Safety Act. Sites with a large enough userbase can be fined up to £18 million if they host NSFW without age verification. It's a huge risk that that not many want to deal with.

[fsr]

So I realise that this thread is going to be mostly about more mainstream or common concerns than I might mention here, though other people will cover those and I'll mention the ones that matter to me, maybe there will be overlap.

Neither Neocities (which I've paid for in the past) or Nekoweb truly represent what I want from the Web, but at this point I no longer trust Neocities, while Nekoweb... I'm not saying I trust it but I wouldn't really trust Neocities again.

With Neocities there is no transparency really, it seems mostly abandoned, there's some proof it isn't completely but the interface never gets updated (that's mostly good, except for bugs that can crash the browser- or being unable to block people who have their profile go directly to their page but they can still bother you) and the years of innovation seem to have ended. Even when they do change something, they typically only talk about it openly if it's a feature they want to promote.

There have been some substantial periods of time, more than once, when Tor users were blocked from their own profiles and from logging in. So if you use Tor, you were fine mostly unless you wanted to work on your site. This got fixed but the second or third time, it went on for possibly weeks. If they had to do this to keep the site running, there didn't seem to be transparency. You just had to wonder if Neocities would ever work again.

For this reason, plus others people have mentioned, Nekoweb seems more promising.

The AI issue is a bit more than either side does a good job of representing.

Let's be clear about this, I consider AI (or whatever you prefer to call it) to be an immediate problem for the web. I can totally understand why YOU would want to block it. I have my own priorities, and AI bots can't be blocked without sacrificing other things that are more important to me.

But this affects all Nekoweb users because it's not an option or a setting. Unlike their simpler URLS, which Neocities did wrong by breaking archiving (in a way that gets / is / sometimes partially fixed, for sure) and breaking your website in a way that you can't just turn off or not opt into. Nekoweb did this So Much Better.

But with AI, we have Codeberg blocking it with a tool the author of which acknowledges is a hack and can't defeat bots in the long run. The bots have already managed to circumvent Anubis. They will circumvent the others like it too, but my argument isn't "don't bother, it won't always work without other methods".

What blocking AI does can and does result in an increasing number of failed attempts to archive pages on the Internet Archive. I can see this getting worse, but for example these extra "Are you _____" pages (which annoy otherkin but there are hacks to fix many of them, I'm not even otherkin and I find automation asking me to prove I'm human at a time when people are being treated so much like less than human is in poor taste, but let's get back to the main point) ...can actually crash the archiver sometimes.

There are MANY sites on Nekoweb which outright block IA to block AI. And I get it- you don't want AI to have your stuff, and if someone can archive your site then they can just get your stuff from the archive.

So what, we are just going to stop archiving the web, or build it so we can't save pages anymore, just to thwart bots?

I mean, this is the choice more and more people are making- to be first against bots (which I can understand) and second against the Internet Archive. For reasons I understand but I have to stand against somehow.

I don't have an answer to this, I try but I can't think of one. Those with concerns have a valid point, but you should at least be able to turn that stuff off so archiving is more reliable, and this doesn't become (for the latest Geocities of this decade anyway) another webhost that just gets Turned Off and takes everything with it.

Obviously, it's not just you- I don't know what Neocities and Nekoweb are supposed to do about this either. They'll make some people happy doing exactly what they're doing, but "block AI, OR support the goals of IA" really sucks.

This isn't the Web I wanted, it isn't anything like the Web we envisioned, there's something deeply backwards (but understandably so) about all this.

Meanwhile, there's some guy on the IA forums who really believes robots.txt doesn't affect IA archiving anymore. But Anubis and similar pages DO, I've seen it, and I'm pretty sure I've seen Robots.txt affect IA archiving Recently. More than once.

What's true is they started ignoring Robots.txt in a few situations, but not most, I believe. People add IA specifically to their Robots.txt on Nekoweb, and it seems to prevent MANY sites from being preserved.

I consider this a Bit more of a crisis than people are either aware of or taking seriously. But I'm sure that IA will have to chime in on this eventually.

At the very least, I consider this a crisis in the making. I would consider it a huge step forward if AI-blocking was something you could opt-out of. But only because of other things that get compromised as well.

To be clear, it IS possible to archive a page on Nekoweb. This affects individual archive efforts sometimes, and bulk archive efforts most of the time. You can archive a single page and the archive bot/browser will crash. But if you want to do a whole website, it's going to fail partway on every try.

I see talk about the benefits of archiving, AND the benefits of excluding AI. But as far as I can tell, the tradeoff is pretty direct. You CAN allow both, but at least one will get compromised somehow. Not always in a way that's entirely tolerable.

[Melooon]

Obviously, it's not just you- I don't know what Neocities and Nekoweb are supposed to do about this either. They'll make some people happy doing exactly what they're doing, but "block AI, OR support the goals of IA" really sucks.

That’s an easy one, if the IA wanted they could release an archive access standard that lets web host like Neo and Neko directly send their page data to IA without any public scraping being needed. Kyle (NC founder) has worked with IA in the past so this is totally doable. My guess is that the work involved is just not worth it right now, IA prob want a more universal standard than just making something for a few indie hosts.

As for Neko v Neo. Im not sure what “era of innovation” you’re talking about, the site has not changed in 10 years, its working fine. Neko on the other hand is run by kids (not meant disparagingly but they are all very young), they are less patient and more feature hungry, but fires that burn hot tend to burn out.

The eternal stability of NC is still its strongest point in an ever rushing world.

[pepper]

I do worry about what I've read from Kyle on Neocities regarding AI, but that isn't the primary reason I use Nekoweb. I prefer Nekoweb because while the aesthetic isn't for everyone I really dig it, it feels much more calm (I agree with Malice's whole post above), like on Nekoweb I don't feel pressure to interact with the other users on the site and I can just treat it as a webhost that promotes my page for me whenever I do make an update (far as I can tell, the activity feed on Nekoweb is just sorted by most recent update). I also like the idea of supporting other services in this space, rising tide and all that.

Neko on the other hand is run by kids (not meant disparagingly but they are all very young), they are less patient and more feature hungry, but fires that burn hot tend to burn out.

The eternal stability of NC is still its strongest point in an ever rushing world.

I definitely see this in regards to Nekoweb    It seems they are frequently adding new features, which yea sure it is nice, and I'm happy to pay for, but I do worry about burnout. I hope that the folks running it haven't fallen into the trap of thinking that they need to constantly add features to continue making their line go up otherwise they aren't a success. There's something to be said for solid reliable stability and reliability.

I plan on figuring out Apache and self-hosting on my own home server eventually! It's a big project and I have too many big projects on my plate right now, but it's my eventual goal. For now I'm happy with Nekoweb 

[fsr]

As for Neko v Neo. Im not sure what “era of innovation” you’re talking about, the site has not changed in 10 years, its working fine.

It's funny that you say that, because I'm both a minimalist and I hate "ambitious" development that throws stability aside for features.

But in this very thread I complain about some of the actual problems with NC and I'm not even the first person to do so, but if you missed that and tell me "its working fine" then I suppose you just didn't notice the (stability/performance/bug) problems already described by at least two people in this thread.

So either it's "working fine" or we have legitimate points, but it's all good I guess. Either way, I agree that the site hasn't changed in 10 years, but maybe NC could like do something to fix things that paying customers have complained about for years, but I guess HE thinks it's "working fine" too.

In other words, don't fix it even if it's broke. Just double down and pretend no one said anything. I'm REALLY glad I stopped paying that guy. Because even this thread is an extension of my experience with NC. I really don't know why I bothered saying anything about it. With that said, you could be right about Nekoweb. I see no evidence that it's definitely not exactly like you said. The real problem with NC is you throw money at it for years but all you get is apathy and no transparency. That's "fine" if no one cares, but I do. Well, not anymore. Because it made no difference.

[solaria]

It's because of The Online Safety Act. Sites with a large enough userbase can be fined up to £18 million if they host NSFW without age verification

That makes sense! Hosting NSFW seems to be very difficult for sites. (I also want to clarify that my point wasn't that Nekoweb is bad for how it handles NSFW, but that it isn't more lenient than Neocities, which was a conclusion people had somehow reached on the Neocities subreddit)

Anyways, your reply overall was informative and I appreciate it ^^