SITE MANIFESTO
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 is consistently shooting itself in the foot, and all other alternatives seem to have one fatal flaw that turns me off. 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.