Why Neocities? A few reasons, in no particular order:

💿 I have an eternal love of Web 1.0. It's an incredible feeling when you lose hours of your day navigating handcrafted, inspirational, fun, weird, ugly, educational, scary, and most of all passionate websites. I miss the DIY part of the web - I miss the internet being a web in the first place. The new web is driven by SEO and if it's not profitable it's not worth creating.

💬 I want a place to express myself. I want to be creative, of course, but most of my day-to-day adheres to a specific standard for a client. It's more problem-solving than art. I also want somewhere to write that isn't Medium, because Medium sucks. Same with Substack, Twitter newsletters, and so on. Wordpress is fine, I guess, but Neocities has a real community.

🎨 I want to share my interests. Graphics. Shrines. Photo dumps of hobbies. There is so much that I want to show off. The best part is that it doesn't matter if nobody looks! There are no likes, no metrics, and there are only comments where I want them to be. The psychological feedback loop that sculpts our social media usage doesn't apply here, at least not with the intensity that modern apps have.

📚 I want to learn. I enjoy learning! The Internet was my first love, View Source and diving into a stylesheets has been a pastime since I was a pre-teen, and it's so fun. Up until this point, I would take a premade layout for my MySpace, Neopets lookup, Gaia Online profile, etc., and I'd customize it. When I started this site, I promised myself I wouldn't lift code from anywhere apart from javascript. I want to understand why the site works.

🏭 We live in a society. It's a perk that HTML/CSS knowledge is relevant to my job, because of course I can't exist in a hypercapitalist world without feeling a twinge of guilt when my free time is spent not doing something productive. #grindset