This came up the other day and it became clear that many people, even on HN, don't realize that in the late 90's it was pretty common for non-tech people to have their own websites. There were many places where you could do this for free, and it was extremely easy to spin up a simple one. The actual content being shared - text and images - isn't really different from the majority of the content that's still being shared.<p>In many ways, we've actually regressed over the past 30 years, to the point where people say that the average person couldn't even create their own page before Web 2.0. And the web has become much more homogenized as a result, and most of the platforms people gravitate to, starting with Web 2.0, went for quick throw away engagement instead of more thoughtful evergreen content.
One thing nobody remembers (or at least never writes about in these retrospectives) from the early days of Geocities is you literally had to virtually "walk" up and down "blocks" in the the "neighborhoods" to find a "vacant lot" to put your site in. When I initially tried to sign up, they had some beta of a "vacant lot finder" cgi form that didn't work. It wasn't like these days where you just sign up and get an account - there was scarcity and a bit of a hunt.<p>I ended up going to some other service (it may have been Tripod?) to host my page before we switched ISPs to one that gave you 2 MB of space.<p>As far as I can tell the "blocks" were never archived so they're missing from the internet archive. You can see the indexes of them here <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19961221013557/http://www.geocities.com/Area51/residence.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/19961221013557/http://www.geocit...</a>
I loved Sailor moon in the 90s and made My first website in notepad in 1997 about my fav Sailor scout<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19991001193925/http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Pagoda/4803/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/19991001193925/http://www.geocit...</a><p>It was so exciting to find a new comment in your guestbook
You can browse through archived GeoCities websites on The Geocities Gallery [0]<p>I get a warm feeling looking through all these "home pages", they feel so much more genuine and personal than anything found on modern social media.<p>[0] <a href="https://geocities.restorativland.org/" rel="nofollow">https://geocities.restorativland.org/</a>
My first foray into "programming", or at least something programming-adjacent, was getting the book "Make Your Own Web Page - A Guide for Kids!"[1] at a Scholastic Book Fair at my school. It was actually a pretty decent introduction to HTML, considering it was written for children in 1998, and it got me interested in learning a lot more about computers. "Websites" had seemed like these quasi-mythical things that I thought only really rich people or big companies could make, but when I realized that I, an actual child, could make a website, it was one of those "the world is different" moments.<p>When I made some awful website with stolen pictures and a lot of awful colors that didn't match (with of course a bright lime green background, obviously), I needed a place to publish my code, and that book recommended Geocities at the very end, and I did. No one ever really went to my site outside of supportive friends and relatives, but it was still a lot of fun to talk to the other kids at my school and brag about how I had my own website. Keep in mind, this would have been around ~1999-2000, I would have been about 8-9 years old. This was before everyone had a MySpace; the fact that I had a website was considered "kind of cool". I thought it was anyway.<p>I loved GeoCities. I miss the world when everyone had their own awful web pages. Social media made things more approachable, and is in most ways better, but I think something is lost in the centralization of everything.<p>[1] <a href="https://a.co/d/4AYuTSx" rel="nofollow">https://a.co/d/4AYuTSx</a> not a referral link or anything.
I remember trying to learn html when I was 12 in order to make my geocities page.<p>I thought it was so cool that I could add the little counter for the number of visits to the bottom. Been a while since I’ve seen one of those on a website.
If you miss the quirky, personal touch of early web pages, NeoCities (<a href="https://neocities.org" rel="nofollow">https://neocities.org</a>) might just bring back those memories, with a similar DIY ethos and vintage design.
GeoCities was the place you’d go to if you didn't have access to an Internet account with web hosting. I had a page there, don’t remember the location at all. Search wasn’t a priority.<p>At this point I was working in an Internet startup building client-side side tools.<p>GeoCities did one thing really well, building pages on the Web. All you needed was a browser. Innovative.<p>Compare this to downloading, then installing software on a Win95 box. Work on some markup, FTP the HTML, graphics, stylesheets to the server. A hint to the future you’d see in 2003 with WP. [1]<p>Reference<p>[1] Wordpress, <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress</a>
<a href="https://www.cameronsworld.net/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cameronsworld.net/</a>
This is not the greatest site in the world - this is a tribute
Anyone who lived the geocities era should take a look at the game "Hypnospace outlaw"<p>It's basically a geocities simulator where you play as a moderator
I made my first couple of websites on GeoCities back in 1997 for my 2 favourite tv shows at the time: Xena and The X-Files. I wish they had been archived somewhere. I remember how watching the visitor counters go up into the tens of thousands for each one of them felt like an enormous accomplishment, like I had peaked in life. Good times.
How big would the entire geocities db have been? A few gigabyes? Can't be much larger than wiki. db I guess only Google still have a relatively completel archive locked away somewhere after they removed cached viewing.
I am a firm believer that if the web had working authoring support as originally planned in the proposal document[1] (phase 2), these early web building services wouldn't have been nearly as popular, or would have even been entirely unnecessary. The web would've grown in a distributed way with people having full control over the data they share. Centralized services might not have evolved into the commercial behemoths they are today. Social media platforms wouldn't exist as we know them, or possibly at all. ISPs would've been forced to offer symmetric connections from the start to meet the demand for home servers.<p>So I see this as an early mistake that snowballed into the cesspool that is the modern web. Things would've been very different, possibly for the better, if we had web publishing tools that were equally as user friendly as the web browser was in those early days.<p>The original WorldWideWeb browser released in 1991 did have support for WYSIWYG editing of documents, but was quickly overtaken by Mosaic, which was read-only. It would be interesting to know why this feature was abandoned and not iterated upon. The Wikipedia article[2] mentions this:<p>> The team [at CERN] created so called "passive browsers" which do not have the ability to edit because it was hard to port this feature from the NeXT system to other operating systems.<p>That could be a hint, but it doesn't explain why NCSA didn't implement it in Mosaic.<p>WebDAV came out a few years later in 1996, but it never really took off. It was seen more as an alternative to FTP, than a native web feature. Why did it fail? Why wasn't it adopted by web browsers? Konqueror seems to have been the only one.<p>Much later in 2009 Opera launched Unite, a web server inside the browser, which seemed really promising at the time. But it was also quickly discontinued. At that point it might've been too little, too late.<p>And now we have Web3 and the decentralized movement, and even TBL is trying to undo the damage with Solid. But I have little hope any of these projects will see mainstream adoption. The modern web has too much traction, and the average web user doesn't care enough about their data to change their habits, even if the tools were simple to use.<p>Anyway, this is possibly too tangential for a thread on GeoCities, but I'm curious if anyone here has more information about this early history of the web. I would love to know TBL's perspective about all of this.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb</a>