Neocities

Website
Name:	Neocities
Owner/Maintainer:	Kyle Drake
Dates:	2013 -
Type:	web-hosting service
Fandom:	N/A
URL:	https://www.neocities.org
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Neocities is a platform that provides free web hosting with the goal of fostering creativity in online spaces, something the founders claim was lost with the move towards Web 2.0 and the growth of social media. It is a prominent part of the Web 1.0 revival movement of the late 2010s and early 2020s.

This is why my goal with NeoCities is not to turn it into a GeoCities parody site, though I don’t really care if people use it that way. The purpose of this project is not to inspire nostalgia. It’s to rebuild the platform for us to be able to be creative again. To have sites that we can do whatever we want with. This is not nostalgia speaking. We really did lose our platforms for creativity and rich self expression online, and I want to help bring them back.

Neocities founder Kyle Drake, 2013

In 2015, the platform introduced some social features, such as activity logs for recently updated websites across Neocities, site profiles which allow commenting and following, and the ability to add descriptive tags to one's site. The tags can be used for navigation, similarly to webrings.

A "Supporter" tier is available for $5/month (USD), which gives users the ability to make multiple websites on one account, more storage, and several other features like custom domain support.

Use by Fandom

Because of the platform's emphasis on personal expression and creativity, fandom-related websites have flourished in the space. It is easy to find shrines, fansites, personal fic and art archives, adoptables, and web graphics.

It's especially well-suited to interactive fanworks such as text-based/CYOA games and generators, which tend to be difficult to upload to most social media sites.

Example Fannish Sites

• Meghan's Destiel Fanpage
• Garyland's Pokémon Compendium
• Yu-Gi-Oh! Webring
• Golden Heritage, a site about JJBA's pre-anime English-language fandom
• The Fanfiction Webring, a webring of personal fanfic archives
• Kyabetsu's TMNT Fanfic Archive, an archive of earlier Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fic
• Sygnus Star, a recreation of an earlier Final Fantasy fansite by the original webmaster
• BLEW, a Nirvana slash archive
• The Circles of Power, a series of novel-length AU Middle-earth fan fiction stories
• Station Arcadia https://leijiverse.neocities.org/