Show HN: Nekoweb – a retro static web hosting

Special mention is also MSN Groups which allowed people to develop pages in HTML and explore community building.

Don't get me wrong either, I think computers today are amazing, probably too amazing to be comprehended, but it leaves little to the imagination. You'd think the ubiquitous access to production-quality creativity and development software for free or cheap with commodity computers that are within the reach of many people across the world would be a fantastic outcome that would lead to a Cambrian explosion of creativity. If the era that desktop towers and Flash Player had engendered was great, you'd expect the era after it to be even more wild. Instead though, it's hard to feel that way. Surely the floor and ceiling of production value have raised a bit, but as people in the retro computing and demoscene niches have no doubt taken notice of, limitations breed creativity, and you lose some of that in a world where the capabilities and access have gotten so good. Sure, indie games are in a decent state, but nobody is going to miss the era of Steam Greenlight the way they miss Newgrounds. And if that didn't hurt enough, Internet creativity was at first enriched, then choked out by monetization, as YouTube elevated and then destroyed the prospects of animators on the platform, putting a disgraceful end to the era of Internet animation that proceeded it. Monetization continues to be a rocky road for legitimate creators and a lucrative pay-day for scammers who just steal things and monetize them. The internet, of course, got choked out by corporations and bad actors who realized it was a cheap way to reach a very large amount of people; and now it's not.

I think the surest sign that computers are not exciting anymore is the gradual decline of the software on it. Sure, there's tons of amazing software, but people dread the new updates. How will Firefox tabs get even dumber and uglier? How will Windows become even brazenly more malicious to the user? Which program that I paid for will turn into a subscription product that I can no longer buy new versions of? Software has stagnated, and now a lot of it is pure rent-seeking garbage. What's not is aimlessly redesigning things in an attempt to be "fresh" and "exciting" but people realize that making their browser tabs less legible while taking up more screen space is not fresh or exciting or an improvement of any kind, because end-users are not impressed by your Dribbble, they are trying to use their computer.

No surprise that it's fun to go back and pretend you're on the scrappy Internet that once was, writing dumb web pages in HTML. It feels like something that would've been taken away from us if there was a way for it to be.

I am a long time IRC user, and still use that to this day, but in a much less frequent capacity. IRC is a comparative ghost town when thrown up against Discord.

Part of the reason for that is accessibility. Discord does everything IRC does in terms of channels, bots, etc, but packages it in a UI that the masses can easily consume. The addition of voice without having to run Teamspeak or something alongside like we did back in the day. A stable mobile app brings it all together in a portable, easy-to-use package.

I resisted it for awhile, with my younger friends adopting it fairly quickly. Then small businesses and we apps started using it and suddenly half the things I interacted with on a daily basis had their own Discord server. So, I broke rank and tried it

What I found were a few key communities relevant to my interests that were having actual neverending conversations about this I like. Compared to IRC, where response time can be days for any type of question, and that's if someone is in the mood to be friendly instead of crufty. This is the primary reason why I stay in Discord and IRC is just sort of collecting dust in my world. The community either aged out or just became so jaded that they made it inhospitable.

I really spent time on it. It's terrible software. Pure bloat.

First, with Discord if you aren't online for awhile you don't have to miss the conversations that happened while you were offline — you can just read them later. Whereas with IRC, you will absolutely have to miss everything you are not online for, which creates a much larger fear of missing out, without any benefit in not being distracted or whatever since you can (and I do) just turn off all notifications that aren't direct pings in Discord so you can just check the app whenever you feel like it. So Discord has all the benefits of not getting notifications while you're offline, with none of the downsides of literally missing out on important discussions between your friends where they might have been pouring their heart out with no one currently on the server or whatever.

Second, Discord just has a lot more features that we actually really like using. Maybe that's "bloatware" to you, but the purpose of software is to have features users use. For instance, embedded images and gifs, custom emojis, the possibility of having voice channels and sharing your screen, and stuff like that. Having custom emojis is actually a pretty great way to expand your expressivity and have really fun in jokes and losing that is actually pretty sad.

Third, like the other commenters have said, the Discord servers for stuff I care about are actually active and friendly and interesting.

Finally, although you could make an IRC interface that works like the Discord app, which happens to be my favorite layout for a chat app that I've ever used, I don't think anyone has to my knowledge.

We ended up going with an open source clone of Discord called revolt, which I developed a custom Android application for.

If I may suggest another algorithm, something like picking from most popular to least with probability ~1/(rank+k)^p, where p is any number >1, for example set p=1.5, k=10.

It can be implemented the following way (by computing the integral of the probability distribution):

(1) Have sorted index by popularity with n items

(2) Pick a random (double) r between 0 and 1

(3) The chosen index is (if I did my integrals right;round to nearest integer):

i = ( k^(p-1)*(n-1+k)^(p-1) / ( (r+1)*(n-1+k)^(p-1) - r*k^(p-1) ) ) ^ 1/(p-1) - k

Would really appreciate more documentation (there's also very little documentation on Neocities!), on things like whether (and if yes, how) clean URLs are supported.

From the "donate" page, what exactly do "Endless bandwidth" and "Twice as smaller rate limits" mean? I can't seem to find documentation of the limits for the free tier, so it's difficult to determine what "Twice as smaller" means.

As there are already quite a few services offering free static web hosting, it seems to me what places like Nekoweb and Neocities have to offer is a sense of community and ways for like-minded people to find each other - and in that respect, I've been frustrated with some of Neocities' limitations (like the limit of 5 tags) and apparent lack of interest in developing further. Do you think you'll implement things like a tag cloud, to help people find each other?

And finally, is Nekoweb open source, or will it be?

And then there's "PAUCI." (People Against Under Construction Images.) I guess their hard work, dedication, and commitment to the cause finally paid off. https://www.andrews.edu/~rickyr/noconst.html

There's a delightful irony in the fact that such a page would absolutely have murdered a browser from its era. Nevertheless, these remind me of a different internet and scratch one heck of a nostalgia zone.

...what?

S3 launched in '06 and is coming up on 20 years of being a thing. At this point it's had a stronger/longer lifespan - and will likely continue to do so - than pretty much any of the old net hosting sites.

OP was clearly just asking why bother using something like this over <insert your choice of host here>. The only real answer is that you want to do something different - and that's totally fine.