The Importance of Expression thru Personal Sites (and early social media)

The Internet has been alive for around 35 years now. A lot of comedic, mysterious and tragic events have occurred across its still ongoing lifespan - mostly before the giant censorship shift towards the end of the 2010s. You may have heard of archive.org, which is a site meant for archiving the wide webs of the net. It has a metric ton of archived media - music, software, etc. But... it didn't catch everything. Back in 2009, a long time after Yahoo's acquisition of Geocities, they shut down Geocities in favour of their new paid web hosting service. That included every single site. All gone at the mere flick of a finger. Yeah... that's not very nice at all.

Have you heard of the saying 'death brings life'? That's because the death of Geocities genuinely did, in two ways as well: a massive geocities archive storing every site that was able to be evacuated: https://geocities.restorativland.org and a number of (indie) web hosts - most popular of which being Neocities! Of course neocities has its issues... but apart from those small problems it's a really good place to host your webworks.

Personal sites, both back then and now serve(d) as a good way to express yourself, in both an anonymous and open light. If you take a look across neocities now, you'll see a wide variety of sites, some of which are personal, testing grounds, or flat out impressive - some a very pink, very blue, very 90s, very 2000s, etc. I mean, take my site for example - I try to make it feel like you are back in the late 90s/early 2000s, because the net was practically not censored at all. That's why it was called the 'Wild Wild Web'. It, subjectively, was also a much better time, whether for innovation, technology, culture, and whatever else. You can also see this through Myspace (and Spacehey now). Myspace allowed you to do anything with your page as long as it didn't hinder traversing the site or include scripts. Just take a look at what some people made of that on Spacehey! Personal sites like the ones on geocities also serve as a cornerstone of what people made with their own two hands under massive restrictions - under 2(to 20)MB of space. They were usually coated in information about random topics too! One site could be a directory of stars and constellations, another about demons, another about deep space, and a lot of other things! You didn't have to worry about being suppressed for openly talking about your special interests as well.