I was thinking earlier about how cool the old internet was. Like, everyone had their own little homepage. You didn’t need to be some influencer or corporation or even "interesting" to have a website. People just made them for fun. No SEO, no "engagement metrics", no clickbait. Just raw HTML and a weird background gif that looped forever.

Now it’s all... centralized. You’re either on Twitter (or whatever Musk is turning it into), Insta, or you’re basically invisible. Even personal blogs are going extinct. Everything is about reach and trends now. There's no soul in that.

Sometimes I browse old archived pages just to feel something again.

We need more of that again. I wish people would just make sites about their cats or music collections or how much they hate school or something. Instead, everyone’s trying to go viral.

Bring back the webrings. Bring back guestbooks. Bring back bad layout choices.

Hell, maybe I’ll make my own homepage just out of spite.

forums like these are neat. i want to make my own webpage and put ... something ... on it

>Bring back the webrings. Bring back guestbooks. Bring back bad layout choices.

People still do that at Neocities. But they're mostly made by zoomers and LGBT fags that treat Neocities as a tumblr successor with a fake nostalgia about Geocities and with modern, cringe social media-like profiles with pronouns, #BLM hashtags etc.

> i want to make my own webpage and put ... something ... on it

Do it. Or even a blog.

What a weird thing to pine for. I can get a lot of nostalgic pining. Personally, I believe we really lost something when we discarded social dancing like we had most of the twentieth century. Though I thoroughly disagree with it, I can at least understand why people pine for old media forms like tape and vinyl. But homepages? They're nothing but idle noodling of kids who have nothing to say. Not all that different to what happens on social media. You complain about centralization, but then you beg for things to return to a status quo of homogenuous elements.

At least webrings are a good idea for organising related sites and getting some readership. I'm impartial to guestbooks. But bad layout choices? I'll have none of it. I've noticed that the more elaborate a website is, the less interesting content there usually is. sizeof.cat is a blog most of us have probably seen, it has a simple layout, meanwhile the site bruisedgh0st.neocities.org is painfully detailed and chaotic, and perhaps I can't spot it under the visual rubble, but there seems to be no content whatsoever. It's not a new site either, it's been around since June 2021, and the 'blog' button still leads back to the home page. A typical Neocities experience though.