Geocities and the Lost Art of Personal Websites

Date: February 13, 2025

Before the internet became an endless scroll of ads, lip fillers, and algorithm-driven content, it was personal. It was chaotic, colorful, and full of weird little pages people built just because they could. And no platform represented this era better than Geocities.

What Was Geocities?
Launched in 1994, Geocities was one of the first major website hosting services that let anyone make a personal webpage. No coding degree required—just pure vibes and a willingness to experiment. Instead of social media profiles, people had homepages that acted like digital bedrooms, crammed with gifs, autoplaying MIDI music, guestbooks, and Web 1.0 charm. Geocities divided sites into “neighborhoods” based on interests—if you were into gaming, your site might be in "Arcade," while sci-fi nerds set up shop in "Area51." It was like the original internet suburbs, and everyone decorated their space exactly how they wanted.

Netizens vs. The "Professional" Internet
Back then, the people who built their own websites didn’t just see themselves as users. They were netizens—citizens of the internet. The term represented a different mindset, one where the web was a community-driven space rather than a product to be consumed. Netizens were hobbyists, tinkerers, artists, and self-taught coders, building personal websites simply for the joy of existing online. They saw the internet as a digital frontier, a place to express themselves and connect with others on their own terms. But not everyone shared this view. There was a clear divide between netizens and professionals—those who believed the internet should be a place for self-expression and those who saw it as a tool for business, academia, and commerce. To the corporate world, personal websites—especially ones with clashing colors, sparkling cursors, and autoplaying music—were seen as unprofessional, messy, and amateurish. Business and academic circles dismissed Geocities as a frivolous experiment rather than a legitimate part of the web. But here’s the thing—they lost. Because the chaotic, user-driven internet they sneered at is exactly what paved the way for social media, blogging, and the way we engage online today.

The MySpace Era and the Loss of Digital Ownership
Even as Geocities faded, its spirit lived on through MySpace. For a while, MySpace was the perfect balance—a social network with personality. Users could customize everything: profile layouts, color schemes, autoplaying songs, and even CSS tweaks that made profiles feel like their own mini-websites. And at the center of it all was Tom Anderson, the co-founder of MySpace. Just a regular guy, Tom wasn’t an algorithm-pushing CEO—he was your first friend on MySpace, and he actually let users have control over their own profiles. But then, MySpace sold out. In 2005, Tom and his co-founders sold MySpace to News Corp for $580 million, and everything changed. Customization features were slowly stripped away, profiles became more rigid and templated, and MySpace eventually faded into irrelevance as Facebook took over. This was the moment when Web 2.0 fully took hold. Instead of owning our spaces, we started renting them—handing over control to social media giants who dictated how our online presence should look, feel, and function. And so, for many of us, the feeling of having a true online “home” disappeared.

The Fall of Geocities and the Corporate Internet Takeover
By the late 2000s, Web 2.0 was in full force. People were trading personal sites for social media profiles, moving from the chaotic creativity of Geocities to the streamlined, templated profiles of MySpace, then Facebook. With this shift came the death of true digital ownership. Instead of coding personal pages from scratch, users were trapped within platforms, forced to conform to whatever layout and content rules the corporate overlords dictated. In 2009, Yahoo—who had acquired Geocities—shut it down entirely, deleting millions of homemade pages overnight. Just like that, an entire era of the internet was erased. The web, once a wild frontier of personal expression, was becoming something else—corporate, homogenized, and controlled by algorithms. Instead of messy, unique homepages, we got endless scrolling feeds, designed to keep us hooked rather than let us create.

The Indie Web Revival
But Geocities never really died. Its spirit lives on through the indie web movement, where people are reclaiming their digital spaces, making hand-built websites, and bringing back the weird, experimental energy of early internet culture. Platforms like Neocities have risen from the ashes, letting people create personal sites again—free from ads, tracking, and algorithmic doomscrolling. There’s been a resurgence of hand-coded sites, personal blogs, and digital art hubs, all resisting the suffocating grip of social media. And that’s why Unwellbutrin exists. I don’t want to just exist on someone else’s platform. I don’t want to be confined to a grid within an uncustomizable app, forced into creating algorithm-friendly content that honestly just gives me anxiety. I want a space that’s mine—one that evolves, grows, and actually feels like me, the way Geocities sites once did. This is my digital scrapbook, my home, and my contribution to the indie web. The old internet isn’t gone. It’s just waiting for people to rebuild it.