comparing neocities and nekoweb in their current states
August 28th, 2024
i wanted to write more about nekoweb itself in my first entry but i put it off after our main ac busted (it did get fixed the following week) which changed my priorities that weekend. i think now is a much better time to write about it though since both nekoweb and neocities received a few updates within the past few weeks that i'd like to share my thoughts on.
before i say anything regarding either service i do want to put it out there that this isn't a definitive "which one should you choose?" type post. this is moreso an opinion piece by someone who regularly visits both of their main websites. and of course both of them have their own merits.
starting off with neocities, it's obviously a lot more well known given that its oldest sites are over 11 years old and many of its current top (as in the most followed/viewed) websites are there for good reasons (not digging into this more in depth, but if you recognize at least some of them you'll hopefully get what i mean).
as great as neocities is, i generally dislike one of their recent updates to the browsing page. i feel like the best way to show it off is to compare screenshots of how the sort by dropdown looked just over three weeks ago (August 6th) and how it looks today (August 28th).
definitely a lot more limited than it was before. while i don't have a huge problem with this change (especially by itself), there is just one question i have about it: "why?" my best guesses for why some of these options got removed is that no one uses them and/or they're just unneccessary to hold up. even then, i don't see those as the best reasons to remove those options.
the main change i have a problem with is shown in these next three screenshots showing the page count on the most followed page. the first is from August 6th, the second is from August 9th, and the last is from today.
i'm fairly certain the threshold for your page actually being visible in the browsing page was increased, or even simply just added for some sorting options. this can be good in some cases like the last updated page, which previously had over 3400 pages filled with sites you could sift through, but a lot of the individual sites you could find there were very plain and/or vacant. however, i see it as a bad change overall. while the most followed page retained about 20% of the pages it previously had, the last updated page got cut down to only 17 pages, which is about 0.5% of what had been there.
i believe both changes combined (but especially the latter) will make it more difficult for newer and smaller sites to gain exposure on neocities alone. maybe it's not what every webmaster wants, but for those who do want to gain something from hosting their own site, it's going to hit hard.
personally, i really enjoy seeing the things smaller sites have to offer. there have been a lot of interesting smaller sites i've seen on neocities that i now doubt even further that i'll be able to find again (at least easily). and generally trying to find new content only to be repetitively faced with the same things makes the whole site feel a lot emptier.
if you want to host your site on neocities, i hope my criticism doesn't 100% discourage you from ever touching it ever again. despite everything i said i still think it's a great free site-hosting service. also, you can see some of the changes i've mentioned here for yourself using the wayback machine.
of course, i didn't write this just to talk about neocities. if i'm going to make a whole blog post about site hosting services, i can't not write about the one i've been using for the past several weeks.
it's definitely a given but i have been really enjoying using nekoweb. at first, i was worried about making the switch from neocities to nekoweb considering that nekoweb is currently much, much smaller than neocities, which made me feel as if i would be a lot more noticable here. and to be honest, i still think that feeling holds up, but not in the way i was worried about before (which i'll be fair, i became somewhat agoraphobic during the middle of the summer for reasons i'd rather talk about in any other post. my mental health has definitely improved since then). nekoweb's community definitely feels a lot more tight-knit and its something i greatly prefer over neocities.
even if nekoweb has even less browsing options than neocities, i feel like what it already has is done a lot better than neocities, and currently nekoweb feels much easier to navigate. one recent update that's small but is one that i really like is being able to see the date certain sites were updated not only on the explore page but in your following list as well. and of course, i love nekoweb's aesthetic and customizability. i pay three dollars a month just to have metis in my sitebox (somewhat joking. i really do appreciate the devs' work and the other features the cute kitty tier has to offer).
overall, i prefer nekoweb, but that isn't to say neocities isn't good. the only way i'll be forced off there is if it completely goes to shit. both services are still great, it just comes down to your personal preference. or if you want, you can redirect one to another, or make both just to redirect to an entirely different site you have elsewhere. it's your site, so do what you want with it!