For years I'd known about the collapse of GeoCities and then the creation of NeoCities. But for whatever reason, I never stopped by to check it out. I've been spending some time there lately, browsing various sites, and I found myself put off a bit by the intentionally garish sites. It's like an entire generation of people has latched on to an aesthetic that was only one of many at the time.
On FlamedFury's manifesto page, there's a link to a mini-essay by Arwen over at wings.nu, which, whoa, that's a trip. Domains used to be real expensive, and when Niue allowed their TLD to be resold, .nu domains were cheap and plentiful and everywhere. I knew a bunch of people with .nu domains of their own, though I never had one myself.
Anyway, the moment I loaded NiB and saw the domain name, I was seventeen again, fiddling with images in a Win 3.1-compatible version of Paint Shop Pro, trying to keep up with the design queens of the teen domain scene (and definitely failing to do so).
That look - purposefully artistic, strongly-layered images, carefully chosen colours - for me is maybe the overriding aesthetic of our subculture's sites. Some, like Arwen, nailed it. Some, like me, had no real skills, no eye for colour, and did what we could. Clunky frames, tables, etc. But: small text. Small text's artistic. We at least adhered to that.
(as an aside: perhaps that's why I'm drawn to Gemini so much, freeing me as it does from having to think about design?)
But I get the nostalgia for the DIY, when most people didn't give a shit about style guides or colour wheels and the excitement of making your own space online was more important than making it look good. One of my friends from that era had an Angelfire page, and I remember she used to update it regularly. Different coloured text all over the place, wild spacing, you name it. Put together quickly, easily updated. A few years ago I came back to it, hoping there might have been some updates since social ate the web. Of course there were none. She, like everyone else, had moved on.
Wandering through NeoCities and looking at the sites I'm a little sad because it's clear how much of it is just a novelty trip, versus something people are excited about exploring again. So many sites have a landing page with a couple of links (all broken). Maybe they've managed to change the colour of their background and text. Inexplicably they'll have thousands of views.
Tag search helps, sorta. If I'm being brutally honest, I haven't found many great examples of the sorts of sites that really excite me. I get it, some things aren't for you, and that's fine, but I'm curious who's doing interesting and intentional creative work on there. Are they on NeoCities? Do they have their own difficult-to-find domains? Regardless, I'll keep looking. I get the feeling I'm only just scratching the surface.