I’m one of those people who considers themselves to have grown up on the internet.

I had my own personal computer at an age I don’t remember, but I definitely did make my first DeviantArt account at 9 years old and Neopets similarly. It was rather lucky that the internet when I was a child was smaller, and kids spaces safer, though even I got into some trouble I shouldn’t have back then at such a young age.

I loved exploring the internet back then, there were so many interesting sites with beautiful pixel graphics and little communities of their own. I myself found myself smack dab in the height of Oekaki Boards, a type of image board where you drew images in an in browser java applet. I learned to love pixel art and drawing funny animals in unnatural colors, and it was the start of my digital art career.

I looked up to people like Kuitsuku, owner of Suta-Raito, a Pokemon/Neopets/Anime fansite and Oekaki owner, and frequented a lot of other Pokemon fansites. I always wanted a site like hers, but I was far too young to make a website, much less own my own domain. It’s been almost 20 years since then, and only now am I finally indulging my dream with this website.

Since I was a kid, I was a part of many different online communities and played a lot of different online games. Byond, Furcadia, Neopets, Whirled, and other such online social spaces were my home. While I always desired a fanbase like my favorite artists, I never really invested myself in an online persona nora stable place to “plant” myself, persay. The closest I’ve ever gotten was Tumblr; I made my blog in the December of 2010 and I still use it today. But a lot of my other old haunts, from Pokemon MagmaRed/Aurora on BYOND, oekakis like Pichu’s World, and other websites I used to frequent slowly dried up and died.

I moved from place to place, art website to art website, trying to find a place where my now burgeoning art career could be seen and appreciated. I left DeviantArt, and I joined Tumblr and Twitter. I met wonderful friends on these new websites, but I was sucked into so much more drama than I ever could conceptualize. I learned about being transgender, but at the same time, I felt vulnerable as social media sites decided taking pot shots at different LGBTQ+ identities was funny. And as my previous communities disappated into the internet, I lost contact with many people. Some I found again on twitter, but who knows if they still remembered me? I don’t know.

Quarantine was an interesting time, internet wise, as people began to get fed up with social media and existing art communities. I started to see people trying to make new websites that were more like old DeviantArt or even SheezyArt– and me, craving a more personal community, joined so many. FurryLife Online. SheezyArt 2. BuzzlyArt. All of them had some fatal flaw that inscenced their burgeoning communities and destroyed the site entirely.

But I was getting more and more fed up with the modern internet – Tumblr’s porn ban chased away so many community members and has put trans women on the plank ever since, Twitter shot itself in its foot and while I enjoy Bluesky, its not the same. I just wanted a place to show my art and share a community with others like myself, but again and again I was shown that the modern internet would not let anything like that succeed.

I missed the old web. I missed Suta-Raito. I missed oekakis and their insular art communities they hosted. I wanted my own website, free of all these startups that try to reinvent the wheel when the old web was just fine.

So here I am, with my own neocities site. It’s a work in progress, and sometimes I give up on it. But not forever. I want a place where I can post all my art, infodump about all my special interests, and create freely without worry. Neocities is just one part of that. It is not a community, but I will find one here, in the web revival movement. For now, this is just one place on the web where I finally have control over what I want to be, what I want to show. Where will we go from here? I don’t know, but I look forward to it.