Today I learned about the “Indie Web”, a sort of web revival of the early internet days when everyone made personal websites and linked to each other rather than using the handful of big corporate sites.
People seem to be either self-hosting their websites or using a hosting service like “neocities”. The result appears pretty authentic to the late 90s/early 00s: a wide range of polish, very niche and specific interests, page visit counters, guest books, chat rooms, random little games, etc.
It’s tempting to get into. I figure that this might be something that would appeal to a lot of people on the fediverse too, so I thought I’d share. Here are some random pics of people’s websites:
This has been my favourite part of the internet for the past few years since i discovered it.
For those interested, most people make their sites on Neocities, as mentioned by OP - though I personally prefer Nekoweb. Both are great places to get started for free though, you can’t go wrong with either.
The basic HTML and CSS you’ll need to know is quite simple and fun to learn, so even if you don’t continue maintaining your site, I think it’s a really good creative exercise.
If you do get involved in the community, it’s a really fun way to get to know people, (whether like-minded or not so like-minded) and a great creative outlet!
My website isn’t as fancy as some of the indie sites I’ve seen, but it’s been a really fun thing to come back to on occasion and use as a creative outlet.
I’d love to see some other people here’s sites!
I really like your site! What did you do to get the guestbook up and running?
I embedded a guestbook hosted by Atabook - it’s hosted by the same people who own Nekoweb, but you don’t need to use Nekoweb to use it :)
Cause every night I will save your lifeeeeee
And every night I will be with youuuu
Awesome! I imagine the resources to learn html and CSS are so much easier to find these days. I haven’t done anything like that since Myspace.
Is there anywhere that people are exchanging tips and tricks for getting started? I’d rather not go to reddit (I saw that there was a subreddit when searching for these screenshots) unless I have to.
If you miss Myspace there is also https://spacehey.com/!
There’s some nice indie-web oriented tutorials I’ve come across on YouTube, but I started with the classic copy pasting from w3schools :P It also helps to use inspect element in your browser on the sites you like, helps get a better idea on how things work.
I’m too young to know what things we’re like in MySpace times but I can only imagine the resources have only gotten easier to find :)
OMG, I’d completely forgotten about guest books!