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Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

neocities.org

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Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#51

Post by kyledrake »

ajacksified wrote: post #50
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…

I was just talking about this at lunch, by really weird coincidence. You were leading the funniest GitHub pull request I've ever taken part in. It went something like this: Me: "I've created a PR to allow .cur and .mid files, like the good ol' days." You: "Wtf is a .cur?" Person 2: "It's windows cursor format." You: "(many paragraphs, tl;dr: Sorry, but we're not recreating Geocities.)" ~ one year later ~ You: "I cave…

I've been thinking about flipping it around - instead of whitelisting certain files, simply blacklisting the problem formats. Thanks for reminding me.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#54

Post by cableshaft »

shams93 wrote: post #12
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…

Geocities was my first job out of school, at that time it took a small army of apache module c coders. Its awesome you're bringing back the concept, when Yahoo bought us out and then killed it they took out a huge part of the history of the early web.

I still have a clone of my geocities site in my archives. It was the first website I made, and highlighted my love of video games, anime, and adnd. It was so 'massive' it had to span two geocities accounts to hold it (different links went to different sites).

I made a lot custom graphics for the site too, which helped me practice using Photoshop, which has helped me ever since, letting me mock things up and still look decent before real artists get their hands on them. In fact several games I've made I just used my own graphics and they still found success.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#55

Post by erlend_sh »

kyledrake wrote: post #46
achairapart wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kyle, I wonder if you had any trouble or how much trouble you had with some kind of abuse (spam etc.) or DMCA in those three years. I'm very happy this project is still going strong!

We get a small amount of SEO pagerank garbage and phishing attacks (most of which don't actually work because we don't support HTTP POST). We have user reporting and detection code that catches basically all of it, the scammers get sick of getting banned within a few hours (on average) and leave to find a host that's... not as good at this. Our policy is to remove phishing and spam and report it to stop spam services…

This is great. Would love to see many of these topics expanded into blog posts.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#56

Post by ReverseCold »

kyledrake wrote: post #51
ajacksified wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just talking about this at lunch, by really weird coincidence. You were leading the funniest GitHub pull request I've ever taken part in. It went something like this: Me: "I've created a PR to allow .cur and .mid files, like the good ol' days." You: "Wtf is a .cur?" Person 2: "It's windows cursor format." You: "(many paragraphs, tl;dr: Sorry, but we're not recreating Geocities.)" ~ one year later ~ You: "I cave…

I've been thinking about flipping it around - instead of whitelisting certain files, simply blacklisting the problem formats. Thanks for reminding me.

I think a whitelist is better, there can be a ton of file formats that have vulnerabilities in their readers.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#57

Post by Kapura »

I've used Neocities for something like two years now to host my game development portfolio and other miscellaneous docs. I've been super happy with the ease of creating and uploading content, and I recommend it whenever somebody technical is looking for a cheap static hosting option.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#58

Post by kyledrake »

Animats wrote: post #43
kyledrake wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

It's interesting to realize someone can do this for about $0.01/site/month. It makes one ask the question "just why do we need ads for social networks"?

Advertising is lucrative as hell right now, and is propped up by it's true market value being hazy (FWIW, I think advertising is probably overvalued right now). Neocities would make a lot of money if we put advertising on the sites, but of course, that would also destroy the site, just like it did with GeoCities.

The big cost at most social network startups is labor. Infrastructure expenses are somewhere down there with the free bacon budget and the open bar tab at OSCON (I'm joking, but you get the idea).

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#59

Post by vr46 »

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…

You could have an opt-in so people could participate in "neighbourhood celebrations" and all show a ribbon for a particular event, say, TimBL's birthday or something, like Google Doodles.

Either way, this is bloody awesome, good luck with it all.

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