Neocities
A free host built as a deliberate successor to GeoCities, full of hand-written personal pages by people who wanted to make one.
Opens in a new tab. We do not control this site and it may have changed since we catalogued it.
How to get the most from it
Neocities sits in Retro Web under Retro, filed as rabbit hole.
- Open it when the evening is free. It has no natural stopping point.
- It works on a phone or a desktop, so open it on whatever is nearest.
- It works with the sound off, so it is fine on a train or in a quiet office.
- No account needed — you can start without signing up.
- Go in expecting something nostalgic and cosy.
About this category: Simulated TV channels by decade, old operating systems and the specific texture of an interface designed for a CRT.
Good for
- A long evening with nothing planned
- A trip back to the older internet
- Somewhere low-key to settle into
- A quiet break at your desk
- Killing time on your phone
- Trying it with zero commitment
Neocities: quick answers
Is Neocities free?
Yes. Neocities is free to use and needs no account.
Do I need an account to use Neocities?
No. You can use Neocities without signing up for anything.
Does Neocities work on a phone?
Yes. Neocities works on phones as well as desktop browsers.
Is Neocities safe for work?
Yes, we file it as safe for work. It also works muted.
How long does Neocities take?
We file it as "Rabbit hole": Clear your evening. We warned you.
More in Retro Web
All 18 in Retro WebNews for nerds since 1997, with tech headlines and threaded comments kept in order by a reader moderation system older than most social networks.
A proxy that serves archived pages as period browsers expected them, so a 1998 machine can still get online and see 1998.
A shared Unix server where members publish plain HTML pages under their usernames. Started as an experiment in 2014 and still going.
Screenshots of thousands of websites from 1991 onward, arranged so you can watch entire interface conventions appear and die.
Same mood: nostalgic
All nostalgic sitesThe 1999 virtual pet site whose real game was always the economy — shops, a stock market and genuinely vicious restocking.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
The link at the end of every bait-and-switch since 2007, and the reason nobody fully trusts a shortened URL.
- <1 min
- Sound on
The chaotic original, still hosting animation and games uploaded since 1999, and still the least sanitised corner of the web.
- 1 hr+
- Not at work
- Sound on
- Desktop
A permanent vaporwave station with fake adverts, a virtual room and album art on a CRT, running continuously for about a decade.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Keep exploring
Category
Time and mood
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