The purpose of this site is to give me a "homebase" of sorts for all the things I make, or things I may like, in a place curtailed and personalized entirely for me, poorly optimized code and all! While I like the idea of social media platforms and such, I am not a fan of the lack of personalization outside of what you can post on places like Twitter(I'm not calling it X), Facebook, or Reddit. You can change a profile picture, maybe a banner, and That's it.
A zine on The Yesterweb referred to the early internet as The Wild Wild West, and I am inclined to agree with that statement. Unlike today's internet, which seems to have been monopolized by a grand total of maybe 10 corporations( all offering a similar, sanitized look to their web pages), the early web really did have a certain charm to it! Of course, while part of this is just nostalgia and reminiscing on the past with rose tinted glasses, there is an aspect I feel that has been lost. That aspect being the human element.
I haven't put too much thought into the "history of the internet", at least from the perspective of how people used it to interact with eachother before the advent of social media as we know it today. Until I saw a video by You've Got Kat called You Should Check out The Indie Web, which is actually how I learned about Neocities.
People still create, and people will continue to create as long as there are people, but the medium through which we view others creativity online has definitely changed. Gone are the days of personal websites, and now we come along for the ride, one post, like, or reshare at a time, guided by an unseen algorithm that could make or break someone's success depending on the roll of a die cast by machine learning.
Needless to say, I'm not a fan of engaging with content in such a way, and I imagine there are others who share similar views to mine. So keep an eye on this space! I'm studying HTML, CSS, and a bit of javascript, so this site may change drastically over the coming months as it falls in line with my design.