Adapted by:
John Tones
WriterI've been writing about culture for twenty-something years and, at Xataka, I cover everything related to movies, video games, TV shows, comics, and pop culture.
Alba Mora
WriterAn established tech journalist, I entered the world of consumer tech by chance in 2018. In my writing and translating career, I've also covered a diverse range of topics, including entertainment, travel, science, and the economy.
Nostalgia is an emotional enigma that often eludes explanation. People yearn for past experiences and romanticize them. They compare them with the present, even if they know that those times might not have been as good as they remember. Some miss the early Internet, but wasn’t it filled with chaotic designs, overwhelming aesthetics, and a lack of usability? Perhaps what they truly miss is the untamed wildness of that era.
Web 1.0. The first phase of the Internet as we know it today, known as Web 1.0, spans the period from around 1991 to 2004. Those who lived through it can easily recognize its defining characteristics. Notably, communication was one-way. Users could consume information, but couldn’t interact meaningfully with websites. The content consisted primarily of text and simple images. Designs relied on tables, frames, and basic HTML, and there were no social media platforms or global collaboration. Essentially, the Internet served primarily as a container for information.
Aesthetic. This era had a specific aesthetic that many who lived through it remember vividly, associating it with a particular time and place. Neocities, a hosting service launched in 2013, aims to revive the spirit of Geocities by offering free hosting for websites. It pays homage to that hypertext Internet, which now seems to be fading away. As of now, Neocities hosts over a million websites, with most limited to a maximum size of 1 GB.
HTML. Neocities strikes a nice balance between modern features and retro charm. For example, it offers an HTML editor integrated into the browser, and it can also be used to create CSS and JavaScript pages. Free users can only upload files in these three languages, along with Markdown, XML, text, and images. This limitation helps prevent the creation of MP3 repositories, which would ironically fit well with the Web 1.0 era.
You can browse using the website gallery. Organized by tags, it looks like the webrings of the past.
The good old days. What exactly do people miss about the early days of the Internet? That sense of novelty is what probably stands out the most. Every moment online felt like a discovery. However, alongside that discovery was a sense that the Internet was still untamed. The content was wild and unbalanced, reflecting the creators’ interests and desires rather than being shaped by algorithms that dictated what people wanted to see.
Effort. This nostalgia celebrates the “effort” intrinsic to any pioneering technology. The accidental experimental designs and slow connections highlighted the necessity of building the Internet as it evolved. It’s also reflected in the various detours to contact someone, whether through buried email addresses, guestbooks, forums, or early chat systems.
Neocities is both a nod to and a tribute to those times, although with websites that are easier to navigate. After all, the Internet is continuously evolving.
Images | Kimberly Nguyen | Neocities
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