reflecting after 2024
It is, as I write this, mid-January 2025, making this essay extremely belated. Luckily, I have the fantastic excuse that I spent the last week of 2024 so ill that I could barely talk, much less focus on writing anything. The fact that this post would probably still be belated even if that wasn't the case is irrelevant. I'm not great with deadlines, especially arbitrary ones, and it's hard to get more arbitrary than New Year's.
Anyway, my point is, it is now no longer the same calendar year it was when I started this website. Which means the fact that I have next to nothing on here is starting to become unbearably embarrassing. Sadly I have not written anything for this site in the past few months, but I have been doing a fair bit of poking through neocities/personal sites. Here are some of the things I have seen:
- Sites that heavily prioritize their aesthetic over usability, accessibility, or having any (for lack of better term) original content.
- Sites whose priorities are the reverse of A.
- Free layouts, code, and links to resources.
- Demands that other users remove or change parts of their site that may have been stolen from or "inspired by" other sites.
- Many manifestos on why having a personal site is important.
- Some notable posts critiquing fairly popular neocities trends and communities.
- Some websites that made me feel like I was reading the webmaster's diary.
- Some websites that made me feel like I was reading a carrd.
- This extremely cool game which is for some reason hosted on neocities.
Please note I'm presenting this list here without judgement. I actually find the culture(s) around the "indie web" (used as a catchall term here, despite the fact that IndieWeb is its own organization with distinct guidelines) quite interesting. I'd like to do a more indepth writeup on that someday, after I conduct more research and wrangle my thoughts into some semblance of order. For now, these are just general personal observations.
(2024 observation no.1: it seems some sick part of me actually misses academia)
Unfortunately, this obsession with the differing values of other neocities users led to the inevitable questioning of my own. Where would I place my own site on these scales, and where do I actually want it to fall? How much of that want is genuine vs. inspired by others? Many of the users on here love to wax poetry about the true self-expression allowed by building a website, but expression very rarely exists in a vacuum. In truth, we are always being influenced by each other. The fact that neocities is itself a social media (although people are understandably reluctant to acknowledge this fact), with public follower counts and algorithmically promoted content, only encourages this.
Again, I say this without judgement. There are both pros and cons to the features of modern social media, and to the fact that no person is completely original. And, in fact, observing other websites is most definitely helpful in being able to set your own goals. My adventures through the wilds (in the way that a national park is wild) of neocities were enlightening. I don't like layouts with miles of dead space. I don't like text in boxes you have to scroll. I do like interactive elements. I don't like websites that feel purposeless. Thus, I gained a better understanding of my own priorities for my website, including a determination to actually say something on it.
But, being as I am the type of person that I am, this also sparked a mild web-identity-crisis. The endless options for self-expression that a personal website offers, lauded in every manifesto on here, became overwhelming. I wanted my site to be authentic, yes, but do I even know what my real, true, authentic website would look like? Or what I would want it to look like?
(2024 observation no.2: i am still a deeply neurotic individual)
The thing about making a public website is you are implicitly performing for an audience. On at least some level, you are designing to make people perceive you a certain way. Ironically, I feel the weight of perception much more strongly here on neocities than on other social media (in fairness, though, I only really use tumblr, and anyone trying to be seen as “cool” on tumblr is an idiot). Unlike other social media, making a webpage requires more thought, more intention, and, unless you're churning out HTML faster than most people can tweet, more desire for permanence.
This is actually why I made this site in the first place. When I first began working on the site, I marvelled at how different it felt than posting on social media, how much more I was considering my words. Won't it be nice, I thought, to have a record of my thoughts that isn't just random posts buried deep in my blog archive. I still think so, but I failed to realize how easily being mindful of my content could turn into simply not having any. Also, it's quite easy to start feeling pretentious.
I could keep rambling on about this for a while, but hopefully you get the picture. I probably won't stop thinking about all this. I probably won't ever feel secure enough in some grand purpose of this site to write a whole "manifesto" about it. Hopefully I will write something despite that. Hopefully it will be before the next arbitrary deadline.
I don't have a more satisfying conclusion to these thoughts (but if you do, or if this sparked some thoughts of your own, I'd love to hear them lol), so I'll end by sharing a story that feels somewhat relevant:
Once, while taking an art class, the professor assigned us the task of creating a piece "abstracting something that cannot be abstracted". This was deeply confusing to me, and I demanded elaboration. The professor told me not to overthink it. I did not heed this advice, and eventually came to the horrifying conclusion that there was nothing that couldn't be abstracted. All of human language, and music, and art are abstractions of concepts we can only express imperfectly.
Since I was unable to fulfill the actual requirements after this epiphany, I turned in a piece declaring that everyone's perception of everything was merely a collection of abstractions. "YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO TRULY EXPRESS YOURSELF" I wrote across it, "BUT YOU CAN TRY ANYWAY". I got an A, but I still have no idea what the professor was asking for.
(2024 observation no.3: it feels weird to only have two observations in this post)