My name is Andrew, and thanks for visiting my website!!
I created my Neocities account on the 1st of April, 2026, to write about various things that interest me. This is primarily for my own enjoyment, partly in case other people care enough to read what I've written, and partly to try to remember the way things were in better times.
Some of my interests which I intend to write about if I find the time are:
I was born in 1995, and the internet was a deeply formative part of my experience growing up in the mid to late 2000s. By that time it was clearly mainstream, but it was also nearly unrecognisable compared to its state in 2026. Many of the most major fixtures of today's internet already existed, but one thing that was utterly different was the culture.
One of the most striking features of the internet today is how centralised it is. There are more websites than have ever existed, but a vast majority of traffic is concentrated on a tiny handful of those websites, owned by an even more minuscule number of corporations. Smaller communities still exist, but they have long since been totally eclipsed by the enormous agglomeration of social media.
When I was growing up, more than anything else I loved the feeling of individuality and community which pervaded the internet. Anybody could make a website about whatever they wanted, many people did, and others would actually discover, use, and engage with them. Most of my early interactions were on online forums, and even though these were large websites, the sense of friendship and community was extraordinary when compared to the most nominally similiar websites which exist today, like Reddit. Many of my oldest friends are people I met on these forums, many of whom I still keep in touch with, and it's very hard to imagine something like that happening today.
It is clear that this sense of community has slowly eroded over time, and is now a shadow of how things were. The most common complaint about the modern internet is enshittification, the degradation in quality of popular and important websites. I certainly agree with this, and this decline is definitely a more significant problem than the one I have identified, but they both contribute to my sadness about the way that the internet is today and how it used to be.
It seems to me that the popularity of websites like Neocities is driven by the similar feelings that many people around my age have. I was too young to really understand how special things were, and it was impossible for anybody to know how much things would change by the time I had become an adult. But I have always enjoyed writing about things that interest me, and I decided I'd love to give that a try in this form.
I love the aesthetic of plain HTML; the purpose of the website is to record my thoughts about my interests, rather than to look fancy; and I know nothing about HTML and have no great desire to learn. You may draw whatever conclusions you wish about the relative importance of these factors.