Me: "I've created a PR to allow .cur and .mid files, like the good ol' days."
You: "Wtf is a .cur?"
Person 2: "It's windows cursor format."
You: "(many paragraphs, tl;dr: Sorry, but we're not recreating Geocities.)"
~ one year later ~
You: "I caved. I've merged, sorry for being a dick."
After so long, I'd completely forgotten about the PR and found it hilarious that you eventually merged my PR. I'm happy to see things continue forward :D
Thanks for all your hard work on the site by the way! I've actually taken the opportunity to use it at my new job, as one option for students to publish/show work in our basic web/html course at Voss FHS[1].
Did you manage to keep publishing the transparent financial reports? As I've mentioned before, I personally find the openess of the whole operation to one of the most interesting bits of the site :-)
[1] http://voss.fhs.no/english/information-about-voss-folkehogsk...
I do work very intentionally on not living in the past, though. The epiphany that led me to Neocities was that creating your own weird static HTML site was not an anachronistic activity, but rather something that was simply too early for it's time. I think it has become relevant and modern because of the massive improvements to HTML/CSS/JS.
The theory seems to be panning out: https://neocities.org/browse
Why do you have to only use 140 chars? Frankly the "old web" is still there. You're just as free to create whatever you like using HTML and CSS and host it anywhere that works for you. In fact it's gotten easier: browsers are more consistent, CSS is getting more powerful, and there are a myriad static hosting options these days.
So go build something creative! ..and then share the hyperlink in some 140 char social network.
Sounds like a reference to Twitter.
> Frankly the "old web" is still there.
Frankly, a lot of it isn't. Culturally at least, even if some things like Tripod and Angelfire seem to still be around. Around the mid-90s, Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod, and similar hosts were the web to a lot of people, the way that Facebook and Twitter are the web to a lot of people now.
I made a lot custom graphics for the site too, which helped me practice using Photoshop, which has helped me ever since, letting me mock things up and still look decent before real artists get their hands on them. In fact several games I've made I just used my own graphics and they still found success.
* GeoCities started in LA, I'm just assuming you still live there.
I think Archive.org has a lot of the old Geocities sites.
Will subscribe to your RSS feed, but wanted to specifically say that I for one would love reading about your cheap anycast network setup & operations framework. Thanks again for the original Geocities rescue and great work on the direction that Neocities is heading!
Let me make a wrong guess to give you motivation: you had to physcially visit IXP's across the globe to set IP's on network interfaces of computers you rented there?
These days he is a VC based in LA and does a lot of philanthropy: http://www.bohnettfoundation.org
He has one of the original enigma machines: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-i...
And here's a very good hour-long interview with him about Geocities, can't recommend this enough: http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2015/05/david-bohnett-...
Using Neocities with IPFS has been really great for stress testing, as we have a lot of content and it links to itself in really weird ways. It's discovered some performance bottlenecks that the IPFS devs have been able to solve. The result is that the newest IPFS implementations are much, much better for massive datasets.
I'm a very strong believer in the distributed web. I think it's the future of static web content. People much smarter than me think it's the future of the dynamic web too, but I'm pretty single-focused on the static side of things right now.
I'm very happy this project is still going strong!
Our policy is to remove phishing and spam and report it to stop spam services. The major reason for this is that I want to keep our nose clean for pagerank purposes. I don't want Google to decide we're just a garbage dump and dock all our sites in search results. I surmise (rather, I hope) that our pages have a much higher rank than many other free hosting providers (and even some major social networks) because we work so hard to be proactive on this problem.
I wish Google provided better resources for this than they currently do. I'd love an API to report SEO pagerank spam, for example. Right now I have to do it manually with a form.
Abuse was not a reason, it was the reason we ended up rolling our own anycast CDN with our own ASN (https://whois.arin.net/rest/asn/AS395409). Abuse reporting goes to whomever owns the IP address, so our hosting providers would get these complaints. There was a real concern we would lose our hosting providers. The important thing to understand is that most hosting providers think you're just running a Wordpress blog, so if there's an abuse complaint they just think your blog got hacked and treat you accordingly. If you want to be an ISP, learn BGP, the cloud will not save you.
We don't get many DMCA takedowns, it's usually something really dumb and arbitrary. One of the reasons for this is probably that we blacklist certain types of file formats (such as videos and mp3s). The idea with Neocities is to use it to make web sites, so for free sites, we only allow file types useful for making web sites. Supporter accounts are not subject to these restrictions.
We used to get more classic spam (porn, "dick pillz", etc.) but not as much these days because it isn't as effective. That spam tended to hover around whatever social ill Americans were experiencing. For example, before the Affordable Healthcare Act kicked in, we got a lot of online pharmacy drugstore spam preying on people that couldn't afford their medicine. It might come back if they start dismantling the ACA.
As for comment spam (for the main site), we have strict requirements to allow commenting. You have to wait a week, make a site, update it at least a few times, and do some other specific things before you can comment.
That's not only helped with spam, it's also helped to deal with jerks. It's hard to stay mad enough at something to wait a week while engaging in psychological sublimation, just to leave a turd on someone's site profile at the end of it.
And no advertising on sites, ever. This is our golden rule.
My goal is to never make any changes to other people's sites. The only exception I'm giving myself is for an extreme emergency, such as a major security problem. It's never come up, I doubt it ever will. During the SSL transition there were a few sites I helped convert to SSL, but that was with permission from the site owner.
I remember the watermarks. They sucked.
Either way, this is bloody awesome, good luck with it all.
Then pad the bill a lot of misc other nonsense: social media liability insurance (yes this is a thing), ARIN fees, LLC registration, a literal fax machine (for DMCA compliance), monitoring, etc. Grand total will hover around $1000.
Architecture is a core + CDN model. The main servers run as a HA cluster in a datacenter, and then the anycast CDN caches content at the edge. It's not too far away from how S3+Cloudfront works or something like Cloudflare works. Nginx does all the heavy lifting, and the "front store" is just a giant blob of ruby: https://github.com/neocities/neocities
Not too bad for 110,000 web sites. Costs at this point are pretty stable for the next million sites (but surprises happen). I can double our bandwidth capacity for about $200/mo in less than a few hours if I needed to in a pinch.
The sites average about 25 million unique views (IP address per hour) and 50 million hits per month. This increases about 20% per month, sometimes slowing down a bit, then shooting right back up again.
Every once in a while a big site somewhere hotlinks an asset on Neocities and this skyrockets, but we just ask them to host the asset(s) directly and things go back to normal. Technically it's never caused any capacity issues, but obviously we don't want huge sites hosted elsewhere to use Neocities as a CDN.
The big cost at most social network startups is labor. Infrastructure expenses are somewhere down there with the free bacon budget and the open bar tab at OSCON (I'm joking, but you get the idea).
I can be high and mighty about this, but legally Neocities is a public benefit LLC, so it is infact a private business operating on a freemium model.
I've pondered arranging Neocities as a nonprofit, but unfortunately that would add a ton of paperwork, costs, and bureaucracy. All I would really get in return is the option to roll the dice a couple times on some temp grants. Not sure it's worth it.
As for VC, I have good friends in VC, but I'm not really interested and nobody's ever offered. IMHO there's insufficient demand to justify 10x growth companies here. There's some people doing business/developer focused static hosting VC startups, but again, lots of competition and insufficient demand. Most of them have ended up as talent acquisitions, and the sites they hosted shut down. We've outlived most of them with the supporter/donation model.
Any webhost (paid or not) can disappear overnight, so it's generally a good practice to keep two or three copies of the source code of any website (one at a home computer, one on GitHub or something).
Besides, aren't kids into the whole ephemeral thing now (Snapchat and the like)?
where did you buy the IP addresses? I them for sale on sites that purport to auction IP space but I've never known which of those sites are trustworthy etc.
For instance, if there were scandal allegations involving your favorite politician, and a Neocities user was writing about them, would you take the pages down at their request?
Neocities was actually launched and bootstrapped on HN about 3 years ago, and donations from HN users bankrolled the first year of operating it. Things have been going really well, the site is growing and still sustains it's own existence through donations and supporter accounts.
I still work on the site heavily. We're launching some big features soon (more space, Github webhook deploys, etc.). We just finished migrating to SSL (for everything, including hosted sites).
I've had to do some pretty crazy stuff to make the site work, some of which is not documented well and I think the HN crowd would find pretty interesting. For example, we figured out how to run our own global anycast network for "cheap". I would love to share how to do that with people, there is approximately zero information online or in books on operating anycast networks.
My new years resolution was to get better at writing about some of the crazy tech I've had to do for the site. If you're interested, there's an RSS feed you can subscribe to for our blog where it will be posted in the future: https://blog.neocities.org/feed.xml
Again, thanks go to HN. Site literally wouldn't exist without it, you were basically our seed investor. Feel free to ask me questions, I'll try to answer. That's something you're supposed to do with your investors, right?