Why Neocities?

If you've been browsing various pages hosted on NeoCities, you've certainly seen some variant of this phrase more than enough times: “I dislike the modern centralized internet and miss how the internet used to be”. I'd wager you're probably tired of hearing it by now, but it needs to be said by me specifically because everything I say has greater meaning: I dislike the modern centralized internet and miss how the internet used to be. I truly detest modern social media. I’d be a fool to not mention there are some positives to it (though for me that’s largely been connecting with people irl, ironically enough) but I firmly believe the negatives far outweigh them. Websites like tiktok and twitter- I'm sorry, I mean X- are designed to keep you engaged and enraged and are constantly dangling keys in front of your face like a baby so frequently that any information presented in a way that doesn’t immediately grab your attention is immediately discarded in favor of the eye-catching twitter screenshot summarizing the current event everyone will forget about in a week. Misinformation spreads like rapid-fire. Nuance is lost. Words such as “gaslighting”, “love-bombing” or “gentrifying” (to name a few) are thrown around so frivolously that it becomes difficult to draw attention to the original problems these terms were meant to describe. Some social media user becomes the villain of the week and there are people whose careers are founded in lambasting these “villains” until they fade into irrelevancy. And I am fucking sick of it. Fortunately for me, I have long since broken out of the hellscape that is the social media outrage cycle and my life has only improved since then. Unfortunately that can’t be said for a lot of people, which is a crime. But the biggest flaw with modern social media has to be how controlled it is by tech oligarchs, when the only person with that much control over anything should be me, The Demon Goddess, Kiki Ash. Truly disgusting. I encourage all to break out of their social media shackles and to help rebuild the internet, not the internet of the past, but something greater. An internet we can truly call ours.