Kyle Drake, CEO of Neocities, is talking at the Web 1.0 conference. His topic is how to “bring back the spirit of geocities for the modern web.” The talk is on his “derpy” Web site

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

“When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability,” said Why the Lucky Stiff. “Remember when everybody created Web sites?” Kyle asks. (He points to a screen capture of Mark Zuckerberg’s homepage, which is still available at the Internet Archive.) In the spirit of fairness, he shows his own first home page. And then some very early 90’s-ish home pages that “highlight the dorkiness of the 90’s Web.”

“They looked bad. But so what? They were fun. They were creative. They were quirky. They were interesting, And what did we replace them with? With a Twitter textbox.” Those textboxes are minimal and the same for everyone. Everyone’s profiles at Facebook has the same categories available.”It seems strange to me that we call that new and Web pages old.”

We got rid of the old Web because it wasn’t profitable. “This isn’t progress. It’s a nightmare. So, how do we take the good things about the old Web and modernize it? How do we bring back the old idea of people creating things and expressing themselves?”

That’s why Kyle founded Neocities. 1. It brings back free home pages. 2. No ads. 3. Protects sites against being shut down. It’s open source, too. It currently hosts 100,000 sites.

“This is not nostalgia,” he says. Web sites do things that social networks can’t. A Web site gives you more control and the ability to be more of who you are, with the confidence that the site will persist. And the good news about persistence is that pages still render, often perfectly, even decades later. Also, the Internet Archive can back them up easily. It also makes it easy to create curated lists and collections.

He’s working with IPFS so that Neocities sites can be community hosted.

QA

Me: How does he sustain it financially?

A: You can be a supporter for $5/month

Categories: cluetrain, culture, free culture dw