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Show HN: Nekoweb – a retro static web hosting
- cebert 3y agoIf this is ad free and free to publish on, what’s the monetization strategy? What the benefit to using Nekoweb over publishing static content to S3/CloudFront?
- dimden 3y agoYou can donate to receive perks: https://nekoweb.org/donate https://nekoweb.org/donate Benefit is participating in cool community of old web enthusiasts :)
- doublerabbit 3y ago> If this is ad free and free to publish on, what’s the monetization strategy? Why does this matter? If they can provide 99% uptime for the service they provide, I don't care. > What the benefit to using Nekoweb over publishing static content to S3/CloudFront? This is the attitude that kills the net. Sends of the vibe "It's not on AWS so it must not be used, don't you dare". What the benefit of to using S3/CloudFront? I suppose it all boils down to that folk not knowing the old internet. The understanding where you relied on hosting companies to provide webspace with an banner, or paid-so webspace that's now lost in today "innovative" world. One day the clouds will fall, and your site will be with it.
- gazook89 3y agoI guess the reason to ask about monetization is because you want to know how long a host is going to exist. Knowing how they plan to make money is a part of knowing the answer to that. As you say, it used to be good enough to have a space and accept there was an ad banner…but if no banner, then how?
- woofcat 3y agoWhat's funny is when you ask that same question of a tech startup they simply say growth is what matters not revenue. CloudFlare has been losing money for ages. I use it but seemingly everyone is sure it'll last forever.
- doublerabbit 3y agoThat's the beauty of static websites, you don't need to care. If it was full fledged stack-enabled apps for an important function then yeah, sure. With static, if it dies tomorrow you take the raw html files and move it elsewhere. Sure, it's an inconvenience, but it's the same as to why you don't use a second hand eBay server for commercial piece of kit. I learnt that the hard-way.
- Klonoar 3y ago> One day the clouds will fall, and your site will be with it. ...what? S3 launched in '06 and is coming up on 20 years of being a thing. At this point it's had a stronger/longer lifespan - and will likely continue to do so - than pretty much any of the old net hosting sites. OP was clearly just asking why bother using something like this over <insert your choice of host here>. The only real answer is that you want to do something different - and that's totally fine.
- doublerabbit 3y ago> S3 launched in '06 and is coming up on 20 years of being a thing. At this point it's had a stronger/longer lifespan - and will likely continue to do so - than pretty much any of the old net hosting sites. Many providers nowadays have existed long before S3, 1&1 (now know as ionos) are another. So? My server has had just four years uptime that's not including all my other servers I've been hosting since the age of 13. I can service exactly the same as to what S3 can do. I just don't have £LOL fund where I can invest in providing back-end infrastructure like the corp can do. I foresee it to likely continue to do so in to the future, I even have strategy plans for it when I pass away.
- Klonoar 3y ago...yeah, the point wasn't that you have a server that's been alive that long. The point is that your bit about "the clouds will fall" is needlessly hyperbolic. S3's been around just as long and has no signs of just dying off.
- giancarlostoro 3y agoOr even neocities for that matter...
- OsrsNeedsf2P 3y agoWhy do people on HN always assume people create projects for capital? Lots of cool projects are simply hobbies (and they avoid the enshittification cycle that way, too)
- kome 3y agodude... is that satire?
- miragecraft 3y agoBenefit is probably community and exposure, if you are worried about long term viability just use custom domain and keep backups. And I doubt the type of user Nekoweb (and Neocities) targets is well-versed or comfortable with S3/Cloudfront.
- shantnutiwari 3y agoLike neocities? Whats the difference?
- dimden 3y agoIt is pretty similar to Neocities. A little bit of differences are: - you can style your site box for discovery page - no limit for file types and some paid plan differences: - ftp support - up to 5 custom domains - cheaper (you can get 1 custom domain for $1 or 5 and all perks for $3 vs neocities' $5)
- gnramires 3y agoThis is pretty cool! If I may suggest something, on the explore view, avoid showing most popular (I think it can lead to rote behavior!) If I may suggest another algorithm, something like picking from most popular to least with probability ~1/(rank+k)^p, where p is any number >1, for example set p=1.5, k=10. It can be implemented the following way (by computing the integral of the probability distribution): (1) Have sorted index by popularity with n items (2) Pick a random (double) r between 0 and 1 (3) The chosen index is (if I did my integrals right;round to nearest integer): i = ( k^(p-1)*(n-1+k)^(p-1) / ( (r+1)*(n-1+k)^(p-1) - r*k^(p-1) ) ) ^ 1/(p-1) - k
- dimden 3y agosorry im too dumb to comprehend this math
- gnramires 3y agoNo worries :P It's just a way to try to avoid showing the most popular, instead you'd choose randomly from a curve from most popular to least popular, with the chosen index given by i. An easier idea to understand is to pick randomly from the top say 50 websites instead of just showing the most popular ones, avoiding "winner takes all" effects.
- 3y ago
- 101008 3y agoFound this one, I love the "affiliates" buttons https://lexiqqq.com/ https://lexiqqq.com/
- internetter 3y agoFound https://soggy.cat/ https://soggy.cat/
- softskunk 3y agounfortunately this one expands past my viewport on mobile in all directions and then doesn’t let me scroll horizontally or vertically. i think it’s a pity, considering that even an extremely barebones HTML layout is responsive by default (Motherfucking Website et al.)
- zeroCalories 3y agoI'm always surprised by the creativity of these personal websites. The web is so utilitarian and marketing oriented that I forget that a web page is a blank canvas ready for artistic expression.
- echelon 3y agoIf Neocities captured the Geocities / Angelfire vibes of 1995 - 2001, then Nekoweb captures the budding anime / early Millennial vibe of 2000 - 2006. This was right around the time that Xanga, LiveJournal, and the rest started peeling apart the indie web. And by the time Facebook started growing, it was game over.
- bachmeier 3y agoTo me it feels like cyworld, if you had a chance to use that around 2003.
- giancarlostoro 3y agoDont forget MySpace and MiGente… and a zillion others Special mention is also MSN Groups which allowed people to develop pages in HTML and explore community building.
- jchw 3y agoIt feels harder every day to not despise the march of technological progress. There are so many eras of computing and internet that I would've loved to see elongated by 10+ years. Then, at least, we would've had more time to get tired of them. Instead, it feels like we're stuck wondering what we lost, in what feels like a very boring and much less fulfilling internet full of SPAM, bots, manipulation, endless pointless culture wars. Don't get me wrong either, I think computers today are amazing, probably too amazing to be comprehended, but it leaves little to the imagination. You'd think the ubiquitous access to production-quality creativity and development software for free or cheap with commodity computers that are within the reach of many people across the world would be a fantastic outcome that would lead to a Cambrian explosion of creativity. If the era that desktop towers and Flash Player had engendered was great, you'd expect the era after it to be even more wild. Instead though, it's hard to feel that way. Surely the floor and ceiling of production value have raised a bit, but as people in the retro computing and demoscene niches have no doubt taken notice of, limitations breed creativity, and you lose some of that in a world where the capabilities and access have gotten so good. Sure, indie games are in a decent state, but nobody is going to miss the era of Steam Greenlight the way they miss Newgrounds. And if that didn't hurt enough, Internet creativity was at first enriched, then choked out by monetization, as YouTube elevated and then destroyed the prospects of animators on the platform, putting a disgraceful end to the era of Internet animation that proceeded it. Monetization continues to be a rocky road for legitimate creators and a lucrative pay-day for scammers who just steal things and monetize them. The internet, of course, got choked out by corporations and bad actors who realized it was a cheap way to reach a very large amount of people; and now it's not. I think the surest sign that computers are not exciting anymore is the gradual decline of the software on it. Sure, there's tons of amazing software, but people dread the new updates. How will Firefox tabs get even dumber and uglier? How will Windows become even brazenly more malicious to the user? Which program that I paid for will turn into a subscription product that I can no longer buy new versions of? Software has stagnated, and now a lot of it is pure rent-seeking garbage. What's not is aimlessly redesigning things in an attempt to be "fresh" and "exciting" but people realize that making their browser tabs less legible while taking up more screen space is not fresh or exciting or an improvement of any kind, because end-users are not impressed by your Dribbble, they are trying to use their computer. No surprise that it's fun to go back and pretend you're on the scrappy Internet that once was, writing dumb web pages in HTML. It feels like something that would've been taken away from us if there was a way for it to be.
- chriscjcj 3y agoI was a little disappointed not to see an "under construction" banner on any of the websites I surfed.
- kibwen 3y agoThe Internet Archive offers a tool whose entire purpose is to let you search gifs scraped from GeoCities. Here's a search for "under construction", eat your heart out: https://gifcities.org/?q=under+construction https://gifcities.org/?q=under+construction
- chriscjcj 3y agoThat was a real hoot to scroll through. Thank you! And then there's "PAUCI." (People Against Under Construction Images.) I guess their hard work, dedication, and commitment to the cause finally paid off. https://www.andrews.edu/~rickyr/noconst.html https://www.andrews.edu/~rickyr/noconst.html
- softskunk 3y agoit’s equally interesting to look at this guy’s homepage: https://www.andrews.edu/~rickyr/ https://www.andrews.edu/~rickyr/
- zelse 3y agoJason @ textfiles also did a nice compilation: http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/ http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/ There's a delightful irony in the fact that such a page would absolutely have murdered a browser from its era. Nevertheless, these remind me of a different internet and scratch one heck of a nostalgia zone.
- meowtimemania 3y agoI signed up, how do I update my website? edit: go to https://nekoweb.org/dashboard https://nekoweb.org/dashboard
- internetguy 3y agooh dimden! i love your neocities site! great to see you here
- dimden 3y agooh hi, people keep recognizing me in random places lol
- freast 3y agoreally appreciate the work you put into oldtweetdeck :)
- kaycebasques 3y agoWow I don't usually get sucked down rabbitholes but boy did I just go down the https://dimden.dev https://dimden.dev rabbithole
- klntsky 3y agoI think there is an important thing that many of us miss: while people who did their homepages in the 90s were truly web innovators connecting to communities of other like-minded individuals via websites, nowadays it's nothing but nostalgia or worse yet, teenagers in their romantic phase roleplaying as... IDK, someone who is saddened by the eternal September.
- syndicatedjelly 3y agoMy memories of early 2000s internet are from when I was a young age, and are now growing distant in memory… That said, most of the internet then felt very informal, teenage, and “cringy”. Being a computer nerd back then was actually weird, at least all the way through high school (late 2000s for me) Normal society called you a “geek” and a “loser” for being a net surfer. People with rose-tinted glasses of those times are imagining something other than what I remember, though
- nicoburns 3y ago> people who did their homepages in the 90s were truly web innovators connecting to communities of other like-minded individuals > teenagers in their romantic phase roleplaying as... IDK, someone who is saddened by the eternal September. I mean, a lot of the people creating homepages in the 90s were teenagers. It ended up being pushed out by facebook who's UX was so polished that it trumped the desire for personalisation, but I personally think that kind of thing - a virtual space they can make their own - is still likely to have appeal to young people, and may well make a comeback (albeit perhaps on a smaller scale) now that facebook has pushed everyone away.
- reactordev 3y agothat virtual space is on their phones, not on some website. It's an app. And they have been doing this for about a decade. There's no going back to the Web 1.0. Those days are gone. Saddled by corporations and laws and governance and greed. Now, it's an autobahn to fast cash, narcissistic content creators, award-winning ones too, decentralization, digital-byte-ponzi-schemes, and front-end developers creating 100,000 more packages then they have customers. Now, it's all about the stars baby!
- rhelz 3y agoUm, cool, but how do I doom-scroll until I look up and realize I wasted half the day?
- xk_id 3y agoDon’t worry they literally have a discord server
- pushedx 3y agoWas there a rift in the Neocities community?
- dearroy 3y agoLove the UI! It reminds me of my childhood while I was learning how to make a website using Microsoft Frontpage.
- fantasyui-com 3y agoHas anybody made a retro page yet? Post it here, let's start a web ring!!! I made mine, it was super fun: https://catpea.nekoweb.org/ https://catpea.nekoweb.org/ Also, the freaking marquee tag still works! Here is something to bring tears to your eyes: https://web.archive.org/web/20011201030230/http://davinci.ice.org/index-0.html https://web.archive.org/web/20011201030230/http://davinci.ic...
- jetbalsa 3y agomarquee tag was never dropped, and its wild, Firefox's is more like the old days, a little jittery. Chrome/Edge is a ton smoother in its scroll
- kaycebasques 3y agoI've started collecting cool stuff I found on dimden's homepage https://kayce.nekoweb.org/index.html https://kayce.nekoweb.org/index.html
- dimden 3y agoyou've only found like at most a half ;) also its not just a random comment in code, you can get it to show on page if you find the way
- wifipunk 3y agoI started making one for to talk about and share my favorite punk music, but I’m thinking about expanding it to be more personal too. https://punk.nekoweb.org/ https://punk.nekoweb.org/
- anta40 3y agoAhh... good old early 2000s HTML layout. I remember learning Dreamweaver/FrontPage as a high school student. :)
- jalict 3y agoCheck out this one that I discovered the other day! https://www.dialup.cafe/~vga256/ https://www.dialup.cafe/~vga256/
- malkia 3y agoThere is always https://zombo.com/ https://zombo.com/, the "Hello World!" of retro websiting
- arthurcoudouy 3y agoIt may be a stupid question but why did you strike through 2022 and 2023? Did you create it in 2022 and maintained it since or is it a recent project?
- dimden 3y agoIt was supposed to be released in 2022 and then 2023 but kept getting frozen
- marcelc63 3y agoThey even use float: left to style their page. True retro!
- npsomaratna 3y agoI thank the lord for CSS grid and flexbox. Now that I think of it, I haven't used floats in a while.
- cwilby 3y ago"Clearfix" - when this article was in the bookmarks bar: https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/clear-fix/ https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/clear-fix/
- rossant 3y agoEven more retro would be using tables.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kofani 3y agoYe this guys with yo-yos do not know what is the flex.
- sodapopcan 3y agoI like how this site doesn't do the weird thing neocities does where it shows random pages that were updated in a feed. The sitebox thing is cool.
- ewoijfawoifj 3y ago> Nekoweb is a free static website hosting service, created in 2024 by a group of coders, programmers and artists, passionate for the old web and personal websites. > Join us on our discord to chat with the community and the developers! Gating discussion of the open web in a proprietary service is an interesting decision. Shows that we're still far too reliant on closed protocols for even smaller nontrivial tasks like making a message board.
- tr3ntg 3y agoWelcome to HackerNews, a proprietary service
- yoavm 3y agoAt least you can use Hacker News without an account. You can probably even read the news and discussions here with curl.
- ambigious7777 3y agoI think you can also use Discord without an account (sort-of). If you get an invite you can use a temporary account. From my recent expirenence though, it seems like this feature is a little broken with it requesting email verification.
- littlestymaar 3y agoNobody is talking about IP here, it's about using standard and open protocols. HN and Nekoweb are both proprietary services, that's fine, but they run on HTTP and the only thing you need to interact with it is a web browser of some sort, whereas nekoweb's discord “server” relies on a third party (Discord) and uses a nonstandard closed protocol.
- jerbear4328 3y agoDiscord runs in the browser, same as HN. And the HTTP APIs they use aren't officially documented (except HN's read-only ones via Firebase and Algolia) (though both are easily reverse engineered and OSS frontends exist). There's not much difference.
- qudat 3y agoNostalgia trip, nice!
- ajxs 3y agoFTP access is a big factor for me. I currently host some sites on Neocities, and I don't like that I have to use their Web UI/CLI to update them. I really like the overall mission of Neocities though. They seem to be a great host otherwise. When you say 'FTP', do they mean FTP, or SSH/SFTP?
- dimden 3y agojust FTP
- veilmail 3y ago[dead]
- kofani 3y agoCats power >^÷^< . Algorithms can be helpful, but yep, maybe a blog version? In general Tumblr, Writefreely, I think is not so interested in indexing pages by crawlers. But I have 1$ folks)
- username923409 3y ago> cursor.png is too big, max 1KB Donate to be able to do up to 5KB cursors. Okay, interesting... I'll just compress the png better. > cursor.png is too big, max 11x17 Donate to be able to do up to 16x21 cursors. Awesome!
- dimden 3y agowell it'd wouldnt feel very special if everyone had big cursors
- username923409 3y agoIt was the small, standard 24px Windows 7 cursor. I was just put off by how I immediately ran into a paid feature within 2 minutes of signing up.
- dimden 3y agowell that means it wouldnt fit even if you were a paid user...
- kaimac 3y agoI love the MS UI Gothic pixel font that people use on these retro sites