Making the Web Fun Again
Bringing Back the Spirit of Geocities
for the Modern Web
Open Source Bridge 2015
Kyle Drake, Victoria Wang
neocities.org
When you don't create things,
you become defined by your tastes
rather than ability.
Your tastes only narrow and exclude people.
So create.
- Why the Lucky Stiff
Remember when
Everybody
created web sites?
Facebook CEO's First Site
That's right.
The founder of the largest social network in the world...
used gray backgrounds.
My first web site
Victoria's First Site
The best website ever made:
They looked bad.
So what?
It was fun
Anti-social networks
Now we just get a text box. Seriously?
Fun? Humbug! Now it's all about
commoditization
This isn't
Progress
it's a
Nightmare
The web used to be about
creating things
How do we bring that back?
Three big problems to solve:
1
Bring back "free home pages"
2
Invent a zero-ads business model
3
Make websites that can't shut down.
one month later:
open source? why not!
Our expertise and trustability creates our value, not easily reproducible code secrets.
RE: Design
47,000 web sites
100+ million visits
...and growing
This isn't Nostalgia!
Web sites can do things social networks can't.
1
Resource portals
2
restore individuality
3
Make things that
persist
15 years old, and it still works:
And the Internet Archive backs it all up
4
Make beautiful things:
5
Teach the Future
Old ideas
meet
modern technology
Easy site browsing
Activity Feed
Browser HTML editor
Oh, we had problems:
- SPAM
- Doxxing
- Viruses
- WaReZ file dumping
- Browser crash scripts
- DDoS Attacks
- Legal Threats
These were difficult.
It took a lot of work (and learning) to solve them.
The street finds its own uses for things. - William Gibson
Next steps
- Get more media attention
- Continue improving tooling and functionality
- Increase recurring revenue
- Make Neocities sites stay up forever.
No, really. Forever.
IPFS creates a permanent, decentralized P2P web.
All sites on Neocities are instantly federated.
Result: Neocities sites can stay up, even if we don't.
One more thing...
The web used to be fun.
Help us make it fun again.
Danke.
