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

[Icey!]

Let's say you want to update your site and add a new over hall to how your site looks with a new and cleaner codebase, one major problem you will have to over come is that everything needs to be published publicly in order to see any changes to your site, so you can expect visitors to be confused when visiting a site with a broken css theme. Another problem is that file management in Neocities is pretty much a chore, in order to move files in and out of folders you have to manually rename each one to change the origin, no dragging and dropping.

While you could try and work around the problem and do the update locally and then upload it, there still exists a really annoying folder bug which when you have a folder with many other folders in it, they will be ignored and all the files in those folders will just be placed in the parent folder.

But even then, I still think neocities is pretty good. It's extremely accessible to pick up, easy to use for skipping a learning curve from learning the layout of site editors or simply self-hosting, and it has a visible community with the ability to view other people's creations from the homepage. All it needs is some work to fix up the problems it has.

That's all.

[Guest]

I've always been kind of critical of Neocities because while it allows people with no computer experience to set up a website, it's all controlled by a singular entity, and really, it's not your website at all: you borrow someone else's computer to upload your HTML.

If Neocities shuts down, we will be before yet another exodus like Geocities itself and all will be lost. If they decide to monetize, people are pulled in. If they decide to ban you for the content on your website, they can.

I self-host libre.town, so I have full control over what happens on the server, including the file system and all.

That said, why not test out your design locally before uploading?

[plantovision]

That said, why not test out your design locally before uploading?

That's what I've been doing, I've been working in VSCode and testing it with Servez which appears to be pretty intuitive to use. I haven't yet seen the nested folder bug, but that's probably because I've just started using the CLI.

All that being said, it's hard to turn away from Neocities as most other services are either paid, too small to support a major sector of the community, not known by much of the community, or they pretend to be free but trash your site with their "Made with..." assets over everything (I'm looking at you, Wix. >:[). Not to mention that the discovery tools that Neocities offers can be really enticing to new web designers. So until any of that changes, we're just gonna be stuck with Neocities centralization.

[Icey!]

That said, why not test out your design locally before uploading?

While I also do stuff locally, I would have been totally fine with doing everything online if it weren't for that pesky file manager & and updating limitation. In fact, I do some small edits online and I really wish neocities where more like git so I could just make commits and then when finished testing, I can upload it.

[RodFireProductions]

I used to have one of my side projects hosted on Neocities at one point. It was my first time using it and I hated it. I wanted to host my project there for discovery reasons, but it gave me too much of a headache messing with the editor and files.

For all my websites, I work on them locally and then push them via git where the hosting platforms I use automatically update them. I had been doing that before I had even tried Neocities so switching to an editor like that wasn't something I was willing to put up with at the time.

Other than that though, I do like to browse Neocities to see what kind of sites and projects others are creating. It's how I eventually found this place.

[creaturefeature]

I to prefer to edit my files locally, not really a fun of the neocities editor, The only time I even use it is when I found out I made a small mistake in the code so rather than go the trouble of uploading the whole file, I just fix the small piece of code.

[Nippo]

I have always coded everything in VSCode, then later upload everything to Neocities. Regarding how Neocities structures files, I absolutely hate it. I use WebDAV because it annoys me so much how they expect you to use their website to organize your files.

I self-host libre.town, so I have full control over what happens on the server, including the file system and all.

If you don't mind me asking, what services do you use to self-host? Do you mean self-host as in literally hosting it yourself from your house/other place, or do you go through another web-hosting service with more freedom?

I ask because I have always assumed there were risks to hosting a website from your own IP address. Are there measures I could take to host in this way while also keeping my network secure?

I have also been generally confused as to how to host a website outside of Neocities, whether it be in my own network or on the internet (I really want to setup a miniProxy to visit https on my older machines, but I always struggled with setting it up).

Sorry if this is a little off-topic, but I thought it'd be a good time to ask :omg:k:

[Guest]

If you don't mind me asking, what services do you use to self-host? Do you mean self-host as in literally hosting it yourself from your house/other place, or do you go through another web-hosting service with more freedom?

I ask because I have always assumed there were risks to hosting a website from your own IP address. Are there measures I could take to host in this way while also keeping my network secure?

I rent a server in a server farm, but one of my girlfriends also has a physical server in her room that hosts our gaming servers.

It's not just a "hoster with more freedom" than Neocities though, since I rent a physical machine to install web server utilities on. Neocities does not actually rent you a server or host anything, you just upload text files to their website and they let it run on their own servers. It is under their control, on their machines, with their rules and infrastructure. It's someone else's computer, not your own web server.

The server I rent is my own machine that runs my web server, not someone else's computer.

[Icey!]

I have always coded everything in VSCode, then later upload everything to Neocities. Regarding how Neocities structures files, I absolutely hate it. I use WebDAV because it annoys me so much how they expect you to use their website to organize your files.

I am actually curious about WebDAV, can you tell me more about it? And what advantages does it have over just using the CLI?

[RodFireProductions]

I rent a server in a server farm...

...The server I rent is my own machine that runs my web server, not someone else's computer.

I'm curious, what server farm are you renting from, how much does it cost, and what's your experience doing so? I've been looking into possible ways to self-host some of my own stuff.

[Guest]

I'm curious, what server farm are you renting from, how much does it cost, and what's your experience doing so? I've been looking into possible ways to self-host some of my own stuff.

I rent from Netcup and it's really cheap, only a couple bucks per month.

[RodFireProductions]

I rent from Netcup and it's really cheap, only a couple bucks per month.

I will definitely be looking into this. Thank you

[Cobra!]

I've always been kind of critical of Neocities because while it allows people with no computer experience to set up a website, it's all controlled by a singular entity, and really, it's not your website at all: you borrow someone else's computer to upload your HTML.

I mean, that's generally how web hosting works, right? Not everyone can or are bothered to self-host. This isn't a criticism of Neocities, it's just standard practice.

If Neocities shuts down, we will be before yet another exodus like Geocities itself and all will be lost. If they decide to monetize, people are pulled in. If they decide to ban you for the content on your website, they can.

This is also a fear of mine. As great as I think Neocities is, a molopoly is still a monopoly. It would be great to see proper alternative hosts like Neocities. Only one I can think of is itci.city, and I don't know anyone who uses that.

[Guest]

I mean, that's generally how web hosting works, right? Not everyone can or are bothered to self-host. This isn't a criticism of Neocities, it's just standard practice.

But Neocities does not rent you a server to administrate yourself. They just allow you to put your documents on their computer.

[Melooon]

One of the interesting things about Neocities is that they own their own IP addresses (and possibly hardware?) - as far as I know Neocities is mostly totally independent - so for example if Neocities received a copyright takedown related to your site, they will just ignore it, whereas most other hosts will delete your site because they are worried about getting kicked off the infrastructure which they don't own.

From what Iv seen Kyle (The NC founder) is kinda a nut for networking technologies, so I really trust him to keep my sites online, even if the interface to manage them sucks

Im basing most of that off this interview: https://www.softwaresessions.com/episodes/bringing-geocities-back-with-kyle-drake/ - its been a while since I heard it though so I might have a few points wrong!