The biggest Neocities issues
Neocities never was a perfect hosting, even for personal websites. I think the "browse" feature was the biggest selling points, because that's how I find most of the interesting websites, where I find links to other interesting websites. The browse feature on Neocities and on Nekoweb is a great starting point for people browsing personal websites and for the small creators, hidden gems, that are not linked outside the "Browse page".
On the other hand, we have Nekoweb, which doesn't have as good an advantage in this aspect due to its smaller community (but it does have some advantages in others, which I'll get to later). I don't use it primarily because I know that most of the sites I visit are users of paid Neocities plans anyway, and you can use it subtly to enhance your site with features that Neocities doesn't offer to free accounts, like autoplaying music (which I wrote about here).
Content-Security-Policy
What is this? What am I reading about? Well, let me explain - this is exactly what prevents you from using any scripts or generally querying sites outside of Neocities. This is where Nekoweb has a huge advantage, because not only can you use these types of scripts, but you can also upload MP3 files, which will generally help you add comments or music to your site (via iFrame).
Something like this is most noticeable when you don't want to switch to another hosting because... I don't know, the sites you like are displayed on Neocities, or any other reason.
You can bypass it by using iFrames, but it's still a problem (development speed).
You'll actually be seen more on social-media
Every time I go to Neocities' browse page I see the same websites over and over again. At the time I've been rambling about the need for "Random" sorting to exclude default sites (read it here), but now I don't see that issue very much and it's my favourite sorting that I mostly use to discover interesting websites.
Now the biggest problem is that more people will see your content on various social-media sites. You can get dopamine hits every time someone gives you a like. Also, the algorithm has to show you crap to maintain your addiction to the service. That means that even if you produce crap content, someone will actually see what you're doing. This is not how Neocities work.
If we want our content to be seen more often, we will need to grow the indie web community. We kinda need to advertise the whole self-expression thingy, tell everyone that you can visit the old Internet now, etc. BUT if that ever happens, there will be two more issues:
- AI slop everywhere and sites made by ChatGPT with no real value
- hosting providers could shrink or kill their free plans, and tons of sites will go offline because hosting is expensive
Also, I don't think Special Sauce is the best thing in the world. I've already written about it, so go read it or something.
The "Creativity" of some websites
Some sites on Neocities (I'd guess around 10%) take a very "creative" approach, cramming as much content and, of course, GIFs into a single area of the screen, usually a square of specific dimensions. Not only does this discourage newcomers to the indie web community ("it's just sites with tons of GIFs, what do you even see in that"), but the site itself adds little value. The text is usually so small and there's so much to scroll through that you won't read it anyway because the design will be off-putting.
This is the least of my problems and I rarely have to deal with it, but I've noticed that many people who saw sites like Neocities or Nekoweb for the first time almost always told me that such sites make up about 50-75% of all of them.
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