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Indie Web started a few years after the demise of Geocities, which was shut down by Yahoo in 2009 (at least, in the US – Geocities Japan managed to remain operational until 2019). GeoCities was a free web hosting service that launched in 1994 and once hosted millions of individual HTML websites, ranging from pop culture temples to teachers’ pages for their students (and indeed Everything between).
When Geocities went dark, those websites disappeared with it, most of them lost forever. Some sites have been preserved through Geocities galleries, but they are frozen in time like relics in a museum. They are still sorted into categories for the old Geocities “neighborhoods” where they once were, like Area51 for sci-fi websites or SiliconValley for tech websites. These pages are now littered with broken links and missing images, but still offer an unfiltered look at the colorful, chaotic web designs of the ’90s.
Most internet users who remember Geocities moved to social media and never looked back. However, not everyone. In 2013, developer and tech entrepreneur Kyle Drake, who also worked on Geocities Gallery, launched Neocities, a reincarnation of Geocities as a free web hosting service where anyone can create an HTML website, either by uploading their own or using the browser-based HTML editor on Neocities.
More than a decade later, Neocities is at the center of the side of the Internet that is reviving a different era of the Web, where websites didn’t need to be perfect (or even finished) and communities were formed by people rather than algorithms. This trend has really taken off in the past few years, pushing back against algorithms and AI and demanding a more creative, personalized Internet, which its users have dubbed the Indie Web.
Neocities is the heart of the indie web, but NecoWeb has also grown a following over the past year since launching in 2024. Two hosting platforms are at the center of this movement.
In both, you’ll see a strange mix of old and new, like Anti-AI WebRings, a personal website in the style of the 90s but themed around the Hobonichi Techo Planner, or a website that is an interactive re-creation of Windows 98. Even the demographics of the indie web are evidence of this – the community seems to skew young, mostly under 30, so many of the people creating these pages probably missed the original Geocities (me included).
Just as there is a clash of old and new on the indie web, there is also a clash of creation and rejection. Much of the movement’s popularity over the past few years has been driven by the desire to escape addiction to AI, doom scrolling, and social media. Distaste for AI on the indie web is particularly intense, so much so that Neocities users started a petition to remove the AI assistant named “Penelope” from Neocities after it was briefly seen in the site’s code editor. This phenomenon is part of why some users turned to NecoWeb, which advertises blocking AI crawlers and scrapers (though Neocities also promises not to sell your data for AI training).
Indie Web is about reclaiming space on the Internet for human-created content. It’s not about building the best website, the most optimized or the most popular website. It’s about creating whatever you want without worrying about what an algorithm thinks about it or worrying about it being destroyed by AI.
As a result, design on the indie web is a pretty headache. Not surprisingly, many sites take clear inspiration from ’90s web design, with tons of pixelated GIFs, weird backgrounds, and animated layouts that are sometimes motion sickness-inducing (in the best way). There are also some Internet temples to bygone eras, such as one of my personal favorites, the Frutiger Aero Archive, which is a sample of the design language of the early 2000s. Overall, the indie web couldn’t be more different from the cold, efficient minimalism of modern web design.
Another key difference between the indie web and social media is the deliberate emphasis on community. WebRings are back in full force, along with “Web Gardens,” square 250-by-250-pixel icons that effectively offer a “sample” of your site that others can embed on their sites like a WebRings button. Many sites also have a “Neighbors” section, which is a callback to the “neighborhoods” GeoCities sites were organized into.
Some communities are gaining more traction on the indie web than others, especially artists and the LGBTQ+ community. AI and changes in moderation practices have made social media a more hostile place for people from these communities.
The wave of AI-generated content has made it more difficult for artists to get attention, and posting their art on social media a risky business. Meanwhile, shortly after Elon Musk purchased Twitter/X, the site removed a policy banning users from intentionally naming transgender people. All things considered, it’s not surprising that these communities are among the largest and most prolific groups on the indie web (you’ll see plenty of webrings on both the Neocities and Nekoweb sites).
The thing that stood out to me and surprised me the most was Indie Web feelsAs I wandered through Necoweb and Neocities, wandering down rabbit holes, I realized that I felt like I was discovering something that I haven’t connected to the Internet since elementary school,
Instead of the cold indifference I feel when scrolling through Google or social media, I was genuinely curious what the next website would be, what weird design it would have, what fun music or fun facts it would include. Some of the personal websites contained journal entries that made me feel like I actually knew the person who wrote them, a marked change from the sarcastic Twitter posts and tag-filled Instagram captions I’d become accustomed to.
The indie web also manages to preserve the old vestiges of that fear that you’ll stumble upon a website that’s scary or “dangerous” in some way, like the websites that littered the early Internet. Whenever I reach a page it says, “Click here to enter!” I couldn’t help guessing whether I should do this or not.
But if you choose not to click that “Enter” button, there aren’t any annoying pop-ups trying to convince you to stay on the site. Pages on the indie web are carefree in a way that the modern Internet is not. There’s no infinite scroll, no search engine optimization. Many sites don’t even have a mobile version. They simply exist, not asking for anything in return from visitors (although you are often invited to sign the guestbook if you wish). Many of us probably can’t remember the last time we felt like the Internet was asking for nothing in return.
Depending on how social media changes over the next few years, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more people leave it and try the indie web. Like vinyl, it will probably never return to its peak like the days before Yahoo Geocities, but I think there will remain a persistent group of people who will continue to flock to this side of the Internet to escape the modern Internet.
The increase in age restrictions, censorship, and AI-generated content could also turn more people away from social media and toward a more decentralized indie web. It is both hard to regulate and easy to control in the sense that you can decide not to include certain content (like AI-generated images) on your site, while at the same time no tech company will tell you that you are not allowed to post other types of content.
Additionally, as AI increasingly discourages people from pursuing coding degrees or learning to code, Indie Web can keep the lights on for a community of people who are still learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These days you can easily place AI code on your HTML website, but this conflicts with the whole point of creating a personalized website in the beginning. If you want to be on the indie web, you’ll have to code your part of it yourself, like the awkwardly designed but lovingly made Geocities sites of yesteryear.
- The demise of Twitter may indirectly be part of the flourishing of the indie web trend as there is no longer a “default” social media hub that everyone uses. As a result our online social spaces have become somewhat fragmented, making it easier for people to adapt to the algorithm-free world of the indie web.
- As it grows, the indie web will at some point need to face the same moderation challenges that the old web faced. Decentralization can be great, but it also makes it harder to curb things like cyberbullying.
- Don’t expect indie web fans to adopt AI browsers in the near future.
- Although not directly connected to the indie web, browser games also seem like they could make a comeback messengerA crazy game about delivering mail. Some indie webpages also include basic games. Flash games, browser games, and virtual worlds used to be the hallmark of the Internet, but have mostly disappeared with exceptions here and there, such as some games on Itch.io. You may be surprised to learn that Neopets still exist.
- adi robertson review Hypnospace Bandit Explores a game that is nearest and dearest to fans of the old web. You play as a moderator in a simulated, alternate-reality version of the ’90s Internet, complete with copyright violations and cyberbullying.
- jody serrano’s 2022 gizmodo This interview with GeoCities’ founder takes a look at the old web, the challenges of moderating it, and what we can still learn from it.
- polygonIts feature on Neocities from 2022, right when it was actually launching, highlights the platform’s gaming community.
- Sarah Davis Baker’s video essay “The Internet Used to Be a Place” highlights the countless ways the Internet has changed, for better and worse, over the past few decades.
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