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How it started
The indie web began a few years after the end of GeoCities, which Yahoo shut down in 2009 (at least, in the US — GeoCities Japan managed to hang on until 2019). GeoCities was a free web hosting service that launched in 1994 and once hosted millions of personal HTML websites, from pop culture shrines to teachers’ pages for their students (and truly everything in between).
When GeoCities went dark, those websites disappeared with it, most of them lost for good. Some sites have been preserved through the GeoCities Gallery, but they’re frozen in time like relics in a museum. They’re still sorted into categories for the old GeoCities “neighborhoods” they once belonged to, like Area51 for sci-fi websites or SiliconValley for tech websites. These pages are now littered with broken links and missing images, but still offer an unfiltered look back at the colorful, chaotic web designs of the ’90s.
Most of the internet users old enough to remember GeoCities moved on to social media and never looked back. Not everyone, though. In 2013, developer and tech entrepreneur Kyle Drake, who also worked on the GeoCities Gallery, launched Neocities, a rebirth of GeoCities as a free web hosting service where anyone can create an HTML website, either by uploading their own or using the browser-based HTML editor on Neocities.
Over a decade later, Neocities is at the center of a side of the internet reviving a different era of the web, where websites didn’t have to be perfect (or even finished) and communities were formed by people rather than algorithms. The trend has really picked up steam over the past couple of years, pushing back against algorithms and AI and calling for a more creative, personal internet, one its users have dubbed the indie web.
How it’s going
Neocities is the heart of the indie web, but Nekoweb has also picked up a following over the past year since it launched in 2024. The two hosting platforms form the main hub of the movement.
Across both, you’ll see a strange mix of old and new, like anti-AI webrings, a personal website in the style of the ’90s but themed around a Hobonichi Techo planner, or one website that’s an interactive re-creation of Windows 98. Even the demographics of the indie web are evidence of this — the community seems to skew young, largely under 30, so many of the people making these pages probably missed out on the original GeoCities (myself included).
Just as old and new collide on the indie web, so do creation and rejection. Much of the movement’s popularity in the last few years has been driven by a desire to escape AI, doom scrolling, and social media addiction. The distaste for AI on the indie web is particularly intense, so much so that Neocities users created a petition to have an AI assistant called “Penelope” removed from Neocities after it was briefly spotted in the site’s code editor. This incident is part of why some users left for Nekoweb, which advertises blocking AI crawlers and scrapers (although Neocities also promises not to sell your data for training AI).
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