GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet • Hacker News Board

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#21

Post by relaxing » Sat, Mar 08, 2025, 1:14 AM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #10

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 acco…

I remember desperately wanting a spot on “SunsetStrip” which was where all the music fansites were.

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#22

Post by outer_web » Sat, Mar 08, 2025, 1:21 AM UTC

duxup wrote: post #3

I loved GeoCities and always was sad when social media left you so few options for customizing "your page" type pages.

HOAs of the interwebs.

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#23

Post by bcoates » Sat, Mar 08, 2025, 1:29 AM UTC

486sx33 wrote: post #15

I loved Geocities, the idea was unique and had depth that was visible. I chose area51 and eventually filled my page with midi files

All the good stuff was in Area51

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#24

Post by andvaribekho » Sat, Mar 08, 2025, 1:31 AM UTC

I loved Sailor moon in the 90s and made My first website in notepad in 1997 about my fav Sailor scout

https://web.archive.org/web/19991001193925/http://www.geocit...

It was so exciting to find a new comment in your guestbook

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#25

Post by andvaribekho » Sat, Mar 08, 2025, 1:32 AM UTC

Anyone who lived the geocities era should take a look at the game "Hypnospace outlaw"

It's basically a geocities simulator where you play as a moderator

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#26

Post by dgfitz » Sat, Mar 08, 2025, 1:34 AM UTC

ipaddr wrote: post #20

chpatrick wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just put it on Cloudflare pages.

Why so 1/4 of the internet can't access your site.

I think that is true regardless.

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#27

Post by ninkendo » Sat, Mar 08, 2025, 1:35 AM UTC

pkorzeniewski wrote: post #9

You can browse through archived GeoCities websites on The Geocities Gallery [0] 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. [0] https://geocities.restorativland.org/

I’m so sad that my page[0] never got archived… I started it in 1997, a few years before Yahoo bought it, and I think at some point I didn’t migrate the account or something, and it went away before anyone was really archiving anything on geocities.

- [0] geocities.com/Colosseum/Loge/3484, I’ll always remember the URL. It was a Detroit Red Wings slash Jimi Hendrix slash Smashing Pumpkins slash Star Wars fan page I made in 7th grade. I just kept putting more stuff on there.

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#28

Post by wayne » Sat, Mar 08, 2025, 1:37 AM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #10

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 acco…

I remember it was controversial and "the beginning of the end" when you no longer had to host at a 4-digit number and could, gasp, use a string for your URL: www.geocities.com/mywebpage instead of www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5372 . The "Acropolis" is because the main top-level "neighborhoods" quickly filled up so you had to pick a sub-neighborhood, making your URL even longer.

Another fun aspect of all this is all their neighborhoods had unpaid "community leaders". The hot neighborhoods got tons of leaders so your in was to pick an "up and coming" neighborhood and apply to be a leader there. All the neighborhoods had themes and rules which the community leaders enforced but they weren't strictly enforced. When GeoCities IPO'd, they threw all their community leaders a few pre-IPO shares and swag, which was super fun and appreciated as a high school student. :)

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#29

Post by imiric » Sat, Mar 08, 2025, 1:54 AM UTC

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.

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.

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:

> 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.

That could be a hint, but it doesn't explain why NCSA didn't implement it in Mosaic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#30

Post by nemo8551 » Sat, Mar 08, 2025, 1:59 AM UTC

andvaribekho wrote: post #24

I loved Sailor moon in the 90s and made My first website in notepad in 1997 about my fav Sailor scout https://web.archive.org/web/19991001193925/http://www.geocit... It was so exciting to find a new comment in your guestbook

My first website was effectively a wiki on different races from Star Trek.

It was plain text.

With a few pages eventually having an image and it was just stiff said about them in the original series, next generation and eventually ds9.

It was terrible but I miss the excitement of people getting in touch with the other details and episode references I had missed out or didn’t know about.