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The indie web began a few years after the end of GeoCities, which Yahoo shut down in 2009 (at least, in the US — GeoCities Japan managed to hang on until 2019). GeoCities was a free web hosting service that launched in 1994 and once hosted millions of personal HTML websites, from pop culture shrines to teachers’ pages for their students (and truly everything in between).
When GeoCities went dark, those websites disappeared with it, most of them lost for good. Some sites have been preserved through the GeoCities Gallery, but they’re frozen in time like relics in a museum. They’re still sorted into categories for the old GeoCities “neighborhoods” they once belonged to, 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 back at the colorful, chaotic web designs of the ’90s.
Most of the internet users old enough to remember GeoCities moved on to social media and never looked back. Not everyone, though. In 2013, developer and tech entrepreneur Kyle Drake, who also worked on the GeoCities Gallery, launched Neocities, a rebirth 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.
Over a decade later, Neocities is at the center of a side of the internet reviving a different era of the web, where websites didn’t have to be perfect (or even finished) and communities were formed by people rather than algorithms. The trend has really picked up steam over the past couple of years, pushing back against algorithms and AI and calling for a more creative, personal internet, one its users have dubbed the indie web.
Neocities is the heart of the indie web, but Nekoweb has also picked up a following over the past year since it launched in 2024. The two hosting platforms form the main hub of the movement.
Across 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 a Hobonichi Techo planner, or one website that’s an interactive re-creation of Windows 98. Even the demographics of the indie web are evidence of this — the community seems to skew young, largely under 30, so many of the people making these pages probably missed out on the original GeoCities (myself included).
Just as old and new collide on the indie web, so do creation and rejection. Much of the movement’s popularity in the last few years has been driven by a desire to escape AI, doom scrolling, and social media addiction. The distaste for AI on the indie web is particularly intense, so much so that Neocities users created a petition to have an AI assistant called “Penelope” removed from Neocities after it was briefly spotted in the site’s code editor. This incident is part of why some users left for Nekoweb, which advertises blocking AI crawlers and scrapers (although Neocities also promises not to sell your data for training AI).
The indie web is about reclaiming space on the internet for human-created content. It’s not about creating the best website, the most optimized one, or the most popular one. It’s about creating whatever you want without caring what an algorithm thinks of it or worrying about an AI ripping it off.
As a result, design on the indie web is a beautiful headache. Unsurprisingly, many sites draw clear inspiration from ’90s web design, with a plethora of pixelated gifs, wacky backgrounds, and animated layouts that are at times motion sickness-inducing (in the best way). Some are even shrines to older eras of the internet, like one of my personal favorites, Frutiger Aero Archive, which is an ode to the design language of the early 2000s. On the whole, the indie web could not be more different from the cold, efficient minimalism of modern web design.
Another core difference between the indie web and social media is the emphasis on intentional community. Webrings have returned in full force, along with “web gardens,” square 250-by-250-pixel icons featuring effectively a “sample” of your site that others can embed on their sites, like a webring button. Many sites even have a “neighbors” section, a callback to the “neighborhoods” GeoCities sites were organized into.
Certain communities are flocking to the indie web more than others, particularly artists and the LGBTQ+ community. AI and changes in moderation practices have made social media a more hostile place for people in these communities.
A wave of AI-generated content has made it more difficult for artists to get noticed, and made posting their art on social media a riskier business. Meanwhile, not long after Elon Musk bought Twitter/X, the site removed a policy banning users from intentionally deadnaming transgender people. All things considered, it’s not surprising that these communities are among the biggest and most prolific groups on the indie web (you’ll see plenty of webrings for both all over Neocities and Nekoweb sites).
What stood out to me most, and surprised me the most, was how the indie web feels. As I wandered through Nekoweb and Neocities, meandering down webring rabbit holes, I realized I felt like I was exploring something I haven’t associated with the internet since elementary school.
Rather than the cold apathy I feel while scrolling through Google or social media, I was genuinely curious what the next website would hold, what weird design it would feature, what funky music or fun facts it would include. Some personal websites contained journal entries that left me feeling like I was actually getting to know the person who wrote them, a distinct change from the snarky Twitter posts and tag-filled Instagram captions I’ve grown used to.
The indie web even manages to preserve that old sprinkle of fear that you’ll stumble on a website that’s creepy or “dangerous” somehow, like the off-putting websites that littered the early internet. Whenever I landed on a page that exclaimed, “Click here to enter!” I couldn’t help second-guessing if I should or not.
But if you choose not to click that “enter” button, there’s no panicked pop-up trying to convince you to stay on the site anyway. Pages on the indie web are carefree in a way the modern internet isn’t. There’s no infinite scroll, no search engine optimization. Many sites don’t even have a mobile version. They just exist, asking nothing in return from visitors (although you’re often invited to sign a guestbook if you want). Many of us probably don’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 and give the indie web a try. Much like vinyl, it will probably never return to its peak like in the pre-Yahoo GeoCities days, but I think there will continue to be a consistent group of people who flock to this side of the internet to escape the modern internet.
An increase in age-gating, censorship, and AI-generated content could also turn more people away from social media and toward the more decentralized indie web. It manages to be both harder to regulate and easier to control in the sense that you can decide not to include certain content on your site (like AI-generated images) while at the same time not having a tech company telling you you’re not allowed to post other types of content.
Additionally, as AI increasingly discourages people from pursuing coding degrees or learning to code, the indie web could keep the lights on for a community of people still learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You could easily have an AI code your HTML website these days, but that clashes with the whole point of making a personal website to begin with. If you want to be on the indie web, you have to code your piece of it yourself, like the awkwardly designed but lovingly made GeoCities sites of ages past.
- The end of Twitter may be indirectly part of the flourishing of the indie web trend because there’s no longer a “default” social media hub everyone uses. Our social spaces online have become somewhat fractured as a result, which may be 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 the old web dealt with. Decentralization can be great, but it also makes it harder to rein in things like cyberbullying.
- Don’t expect to see indie web fans adopting AI browsers anytime soon.
- While it’s not directly connected to the indie web, browser games also seem like they could be making a comeback, like Messenger, a whimsical game about delivering mail. Some indie webpages also include basic games. Flash games, browser games, and virtual worlds used to be a hallmark of the internet, but have mostly disappeared with exceptions here and there, like some of the games on Itch.io. You may be surprised to learn that Neopets still exists, too.
- Adi Robertson’s review of Hypnospace Outlaw digs into a game that’s near and dear to fans of the old web. You play as a moderator in a simulated, alternate-reality version of the ’90s internet, complete with copyright infringement and cyberbullying.
- Jody Serrano’s 2022 Gizmodo interview with the founder of GeoCities looks back on the old web, the challenges of moderating it, and what we can still learn from it.
- Polygon’s feature on Neocities from 2022, right when it was really starting to take off, highlights the platform’s gaming community.
- Sara Davis Baker’s video essay “The Internet Used to be a Place” dives into the myriad ways the internet has changed over the decades, for better and worse.
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