Events in Neocities History
By Clive Python | 14jammar
Neocities is a free web hosting service started in 2013 by Kyle Drake,
offering 1 GB of storage space and no server-side scripting for free.
Neocities' goal is to revive the support of "creativity and free expression"
provided by GeoCities before its partial shutdown. On this page, you may see
the (very unofficial) history of the web hosting service.
Pre-Neocities
- 6 August 1991: Tim Berners-Lee announces the World Wide Web project and software on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. The first website, "info.cern.ch" is created.
- November 1994: Beverly Hills Internet (BHI) was founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner. BHI would later be renamed as "GeoCities".
- 28 January 1999: GeoCities acquired by Yahoo! and was renamed to Yahoo! GeoCities, at that time it was the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web.
- 23 April 2009: Yahoo! announced that it would be closing GeoCities in the United States, and stopped accepting new registrations, though the existing GeoCities accounts remain active.
- Late June 2009: Yahoo! updated the GeoCities home page to indicate: "GeoCities is closing on October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files. If you'd like to move your web site, or save the images and other files you've posted online, please act now by downloading your files or upgrading to Yahoo! Web Hosting".
- Late June 2009: The Internet Archive tries to archive everything from GeoCities.
- 26 October 2009: GeoCities in the United States, Canada and Europe go offline.
2013
- 24 May 2013: Neocities goes online.
- 28 May 2013: The first Neocities blog post is made.
- 3 June 2013: Lando becomes the first Neocities' user (excluding Kyle Drake's site).
- 21 June 2013: First Archive of Neocities.org is made.
- 2 July 2013: Meghan Neal of Vice's Motherboard writes an article talking about how "Neocities is recreating the garish, Web 1.0 creativity of GeoCities".
- 7 July 2013: Nick Stockton of Wired writes the article "NeoCities Wants to Save Us From the Crushing Boredom of Social Networking".
- 14 July 2013: Wikipedia page on Neocities is made.
2014
- 8 May 2014: Neocities puts on a rate limit of a "dialup modem speed" for the FCC, due to the FCC's proposal to scrap Net Neutrality.
- 5 September 2014: Jon Brodkin of Ars Technica writes an article talking about the Neocities FCC rate limit speed.
- 14 September 2014: The Network Neighborhood, one of the most popular Neocities webrings, goes online.
- 10 October 2014: Steven Melendez of Co.Design writes "Oh, Snap! '90s Web Design Is Hot Again", an article that features Neocities.
2015
- 3 January 2015: Sarah Lagan of The Royal Gazette writes an article talking about how some children were learning to be "web wizards" thanks to Neocities.
- 25 June 2015: The Neocities Kickstarter is setup by Kyle Drake & Victoria Wang.
- 4 February 2015: Neocities have removed the FCC rate limit speed.
- 5 February 2015: Freeman Murray of Quartz briefly talks about Neocities in "If you want your own tech company, forget [a] MBA-and learn to code instead"".
- 17 July 2015: Amber Case of Recode writes an article called "Why We All Need to Make the Internet Fun Again".
- 18 September 2015: J.M. Porup of Vice's Motherboard writes about how Neocities is one of the first major sites to implement IPFS.
- 25 October 2015: Jason Koebler of Vice's Motherboard writes "There's An Entire Conference Dedicated to Geocities-Style Websites".
- 11 November 2015: Kyle Drake tweets out "Neocities got a DDoS ransom. I replied 'fuck off'. They DDoSed, our mitigation handled it. I watched Bob Ross and went to sleep. #cyberpunk".
2016
- 7 June 2016: Quentin Hardy of The New York Times writes the article "The Web's Creator Looks to Reinvent It" that shows a photo of Kyle Drake.
- 5 July 2016: The Network Neighborhood is shut down, despite this, the website is still online.
- 31 July 2016: The unofficial Neocities' Discord server is made.
- 08 July 2016: OwlMan posts a news update about the end of The Network Neighborhood. The post would later be added to The OwlMan Library.
- 5 May 2016: Froge, of the Degenerates, founds the hit blog Froghand, starting a series of projects that nobody asked for and frankly wishes would go away.
- 25 August 2016: OpenBooks writes the infamous open letter about how "You're doing Neocities wrong".
- 27 October 2016: Neocities now has 100,000 sites.
- 2 December 2016: Melonking starts up the (unofficial) Neocities mailing list.
2017
- 1 January 2017: Neocities defaults to HTTPS (rather than HTTP) on all subdomains.
- 6 January 2017: All websites on Neocities are now HTTPS.
- 20 January 2017: Kyle Drake does an impromptu Neocities Q&A on Hacker News.
- 8 February 2017: liooil becomes the first website to receive a tip of five US Dollars from Kyle Drake.
- 17 February 2017: 118,000 websites and counting.
- 27 April 2017: Neocities starts up the Trump Plan, where if you pay $100 a month you can get 2 MBs of storage.
- 10 July 2017: Spriteclad (formally 98plus), the second most followed site on Neocities, leaves Neocities in favour of DigitalOcean.
- 22 July 2017: The webring, our space, is made.
- 8 August 2017: Neocities now has 140,000 sites.
- 17 August 2017: OwlMan writes a post on his blog called "I'm Quitting Neocities", making fun of Spriteclad's farewell from Neocities blog post. Soon, other Neocitie websites would copy this idea, this would become one of the first Neocitie memes.
- 17 August 2017: Spriteclad removes the farewell letter from their website and stops The Internet Archive from indexing their website, they would also delete the good bye letter on their Neocities website.
- 18 August 2017: Neocities user Melonking launches Daniel's Network.
- 22 August 2017: Neocities now has one billion hits
- 4 September 2017: This page is made.
- 7 September 2017: After a whole year of no updates, The Network Neighborhood updates its landing page. While what the update is not obvious, when you view the source code, you will soon see the message.
- 29 September 2017: Kratzen (also known as "Froge") post "And add me to the Neotime page: '2016-05-20: Froge, of the Degenerates, founds the hit blog Froghand, starting a series of projects that nobody asked for and frankly wishes would go away'" on OwlMan's profile.
- 29 December 2017: The Vsauce channel DONG makes a video called "How Far Away Is Andromeda?", where they link to the Neocities' website How far away is Andromeda?
2018
- 23 January 2018: Neocities' use Gwta makes a post on OwlMan's profile telling him that her school network is blocking parts of his site, as it "contains web content". OwlMan would make a post on his website later that day writing about how he found it to be funny.
- 20 February 2018: JakeOnline write on his profile "all neocities subdirectories have been blocked by my school because people were going to a cookie cooker rehost. thanks, javasnake!".
- 10 April 2018: Retroity publishes the article "The Neocities Problem" where they talk about the downsides of using the web host.
- 13 May 2018: yoshi295295 makes the nocities Discord server after a hissy fit with RocketMix.
- 27 May 2018: For some reason, Mariteaux makes a new Neocities Discord server called "Neocities 2.0", the server was made so there would be "No overhead, no busybody mods, no drama, none of that. We started this to get away from all that. As long as you're not being obnoxious or doing something illegal, come as you are". The server would later be called "Penelope's Place" after the Necities' mascot of the same name. Also on this day the old nocities server was removed.
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