Show HN: Nekoweb – a retro static web hosting

[zeroCalories]

I'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]

If 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.

[ewoijfawoifj]

> 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.

[xk_id]

Haha I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed the irony. It really devalues the whole thing. The next phase in online consumer culture will certainly be the commodification of the old web: reduced to a performative aesthetic, divorced from its original substance.

[derrida]

I really don't get the discord phenomena, it seems like more bloatware and demands on attention and notifications - I mean - IRC is right there and you can at least control your own attention span however you want.

[infecto]

Does Nekoweb declare to be part of the open web? Seems more like the artistic feel for websites as they used to be. Not a very valid argument in that context.

[NPC82]

The people of Nekoweb demand an IRC server -- maybe, IDK.

[summerlight]

The word "free" here doesn't seem about being a "free software", but being a complimentary service.

[tr3ntg]

Welcome to HackerNews, a proprietary service

[fantasyui-com]

Has 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/

Also, the freaking marquee tag still works!

Here is something to bring tears to your eyes: https://web.archive.org/web/20011201030230/http://davinci.ic...

[kaycebasques]

I've started collecting cool stuff I found on dimden's homepage https://kayce.nekoweb.org/index.html

[wifipunk]

I 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/

[jetbalsa]

marquee 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

[malkia]

There is always https://zombo.com/, the "Hello World!" of retro websiting

[shantnutiwari]

Like neocities? Whats the difference?

[piperswe]

I think a decent distinguishing feature is that it isn't Neocities. It's nice to have multiple players in the space, makes for a healthier ecosystem.

[dimden]

It 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)

[signaru]

It also reminded me of neocities which has a cat (neko) mascot.

[ajxs]

FTP 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]

just FTP

[rhelz]

Um, cool, but how do I doom-scroll until I look up and realize I wasted half the day?

[xk_id]

Don’t worry they literally have a discord server

[marcelc63]

They even use float: left to style their page. True retro!

[npsomaratna]

I thank the lord for CSS grid and flexbox. Now that I think of it, I haven't used floats in a while.

[rossant]

Even more retro would be using tables.

[101008]

Found this one, I love the "affiliates" buttons https://lexiqqq.com/

[internetter]

Found https://soggy.cat/

[softskunk]

unfortunately 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.)

[sodapopcan]

I 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.

[anta40]

Ahh... good old early 2000s HTML layout. I remember learning Dreamweaver/FrontPage as a high school student.

:)

[jalict]

Check out this one that I discovered the other day! https://www.dialup.cafe/~vga256/

[kofani]

Cats 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)

[internetguy]

oh dimden! i love your neocities site! great to see you here

[kaycebasques]

Wow I don't usually get sucked down rabbitholes but boy did I just go down the https://dimden.dev rabbithole

[dimden]

oh hi, people keep recognizing me in random places lol

[arthurcoudouy]

It 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]

It was supposed to be released in 2022 and then 2023 but kept getting frozen

[meowtimemania]

I signed up, how do I update my website?

edit: go to https://nekoweb.org/dashboard

[username923409]

> 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]

well it'd wouldnt feel very special if everyone had big cursors

[chriscjcj]

I was a little disappointed not to see an "under construction" banner on any of the websites I surfed.

[kibwen]

The 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

[dearroy]

Love the UI! It reminds me of my childhood while I was learning how to make a website using Microsoft Frontpage.

[kaimac]

I love the MS UI Gothic pixel font that people use on these retro sites

[pushedx]

Was there a rift in the Neocities community?

[qudat]

Nostalgia trip, nice!

[klntsky]

I 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.

[nicoburns]

> 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.

[syndicatedjelly]

My 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

[cebert]

If 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]

You can donate to receive perks: https://nekoweb.org/donate Benefit is participating in cool community of old web enthusiasts :)

[doublerabbit]

> 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.

[OsrsNeedsf2P]

Why 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)

[miragecraft]

Benefit 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.

[giancarlostoro]

Or even neocities for that matter...

[kome]

dude... is that satire?