In the wake of the TikTok ban and revival as a mouthpiece for fascist propaganda, as well as the downfall of Twitter and Facebook/Facebook-owned platforms to the same evils, I think now is a better time than ever to say LEARN HTML!!! FREE YOURSELVES FROM THE SHACKLES OF MAJOR SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS AND EMBRACE THE INDIE WEB!!!
You can host a website on Neocities for free as long as it's under 1GB (which is a LOT more than it sounds like let me tell you) but if that's not enough you can get 50GB of space (and a variety of other perks) for only $5 a month.
Create and surf awesome websites for free.
And if you can't/don't want to pay for the extra space, sites like File Garden and Catbox let you host files for free that you can easily link into NeoCities pages (I do this to host videos on mine!) (It also lets you share files NeoCities wouldn't let you upload for free anyways, this is how I upload the .zip files for my 3DS themes on my site.)
Host your files with decency.
The cutest free file host you've ever seen
Don't know how to write HTML/CSS? No problem. W3schools is an invaluable resource with free lessons on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and a whole slew of other programming languages, both for web development and otherwise.
W3Schools offers free online tutorials, references and exercises in all the major languages of the web. Covering popular subjects like HTML,
Want a more traditional social media experience? SpaceHey is a platform that mimics the experience of 2000s MySpace
SpaceHey is a retro social network focused on privacy and customizability. It's a friendly place to have fun, meet friends, and be creative.
Struggling to find independent web pages that cater to your interests via major search engines? I've got you covered. Marginalia and Wiby are search engines that specifically prioritize non-commercial content. Marginalia also has filters that let you search for more specific categories of website, like wikis, blogs, academia, forums, and vintage sites.
Marginalia Search is a small independent do-it-yourself search engine for surprising but content-rich websites that never ask you to accept
Wiby is a search engine for older style pages, lightweight and based on a subject of interest. Building a web more reminiscent of the early
Maybe you wanna log off the modern internet landscape altogether and step back into the pre-social media web altogether, well, Protoweb lets you do just that. It's a proxy service for older browsers (or really just any browser that supports HTTP, but that's mostly old browsers now anyways) that lets you visit restored snapshots of vintage websites.
With ProtoWeb, you can browse the web like it's 1995!
Protoweb has a lot of Geocities content archived, but if you're interested in that you can find even more old Geocities sites over on the Geocities Gallery
A restored visual gallery of the archived Geocities sites
And really this is just general tip-of-the-iceberg stuff. If you dig a little deeper you can find loads more interesting stuff out there.
The internet doesn't have to be a miserable place full of nothing but doomposting and targeted ads. The first step to making it less miserable is for YOU, yes YOU, to quit spending all your time on it looking at the handful of miserable websites big tech wants you to spend all your time on.
