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Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

neocities.org

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Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#31

Post by badminton1 »

I used Geocities. I think it still exists in Japan. Back then, HTML templates/generators were very mainstream.

Nowadays that use case was largely replaced by what we now call blogs. Many of those websites were in fact proto-blogs.

Later, as bandwidth increased, digital cameras became mainstream and processing power increased, photo sharing was added as common use case. Try downloading a 2 megapixel+ PNG with a dial-up connection... very slow. Now we take it was granted.

Now in addition to blogs, you also have Google Sites, wikia, and countless others... including Wikipedia.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#35

Post by alphang »

kyledrake wrote: post #8
mrskeltal wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much does hosting costs you at this moment?

Just servers, about $550/mo once we launch the new infrastructure. That doesn't include the $10k I had to sink in to buy the equipment and IP addresses. Then pad the bill a lot of misc other nonsense: social media liability insurance (yes this is a thing), ARIN fees, LLC registration, a literal fax machine (for DMCA compliance), monitoring, etc. Grand total will hover around $1000. Architecture is a core + CDN model.…

Are you confident about the current donation model? (I understand/appreciate that it's not a business) I just want to make sure sites can stay up before I start recommending this to friends' kids.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#36

Post by DanBC »

kyledrake wrote: post #26
vr46 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you going to put a watermark in the bottom corner of user pages? :D That was the biggest controversy I remember back then!

N E V E R. And no advertising on sites, ever. This is our golden rule. My goal is to never make any changes to other people's sites. The only exception I'm giving myself is for an extreme emergency, such as a major security problem. It's never come up, I doubt it ever will. During the SSL transition there were a few sites I helped convert to SSL, but that was with permission from the site owner. I remember the waterm…

I'd be happy if there was an option that allowed you to "skimlink" (or similar) my tiny neocities site.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#37

Post by krapp »

jmduke wrote: post #2

Original discussion from Neocities' launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5918724 Personally, I don't have any reason to use Neocities but I am enormously happy that it exists. Geocities and Angelfire and all of those weird web sandboxes are where I first wrote code, and what led me to pursue software engineering as a career.

Back in the stone ages, Tripod offered Perl hosting with its free accounts, and that, along with javascript, was my introduction to programming.

I wrote what may have been the worst ever attempt at a messageboard, and I think only one other person ever even used it. Every post was a single line in a URL-encoded textfile. Good times.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#38

Post by kyledrake »

bisby wrote: post #28
kyledrake wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easter egg time: https://neocities.org/SiliconValley/Peaks/2790/ Works for any Geocities neighborhoods. Jason Scott (@textfiles) gave me the idea when I was at the Internet Archive.

I love easter eggs in open source code. I was able to easily find this in the code and learned a bit about neocities and geocities URL formats in the process. I was expecting that neocities sites would have similar URLs to geocities (in the neocities.org/server/user/page format). This is a fun way of learning about stuff.

Unfortunately the way web security works these days, there is no concept of path origin security, so sites in the neocities.org domain would be able to execute XSS attacks and steal session cookies and whatnot. Subdomains (site.neocities.org) are considered a different origin, and that allows us to prevent attacks to the main site. It's not perfect, there have been attack vectors in the past (which have been mitigated by some security features, such as HttpOnly cookies).

Path origin policies are being considered right now. They're currently being referred to as suborigins: https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-suborigins/

What I would really like to see is a CSP option for cookie access control, but unfortunately it appears to have been shelved for the moment: https://www.w3.org/TR/csp-cookies/ https://twitter.com/kyledrake/status/818931856238407680

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#39

Post by akavel »

xanamander wrote: post #18
tbirdz wrote: post #13

Kyle, thanks so much for all your hard work setting up Neocities! I think it's a wonderful thing you are doing. Also, since we're talking about neocities, here, does anyone have any cool neocities sites they know of and want to share? Just post a reply to this comment, so folks who want to have other neocities discussions can easily collapse all the links at once.

This Serial Experiments Lain fan site gets passed around a lot. Be careful, it's a bit of a rabbit hole. https://fauux.neocities.org/

Note: [SEIZURE WARNING] I suppose, for those for whom it may apply -- the linked page has a weird moire-like fast-blinking pattern, epileptics be careful.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#40

Post by luka-birsa »

kyledrake wrote: post #4

Hi! I started Neocities. I read HN regularly. Neocities was actually launched and bootstrapped on HN about 3 years ago, and donations from HN users bankrolled the first year of operating it. Things have been going really well, the site is growing and still sustains it's own existence through donations and supporter accounts. I still work on the site heavily. We're launching some big features soon (more space, Github…

Please share the anycast implementation story. Would love to know how you implemented on the cheap.
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