Overview
GeoCities was a place where the web learned to be personal. Launched in 1994, it let anyone build a home page for free, organised by neighbourhood: Area51 for science fiction, Heartland for family pages, SiliconValley for tech, and dozens more. At its peak it hosted tens of millions of pages, each one a person saying this is mine to the internet.
Most of those pages were not good, and that was the point. The web had room for amateur enthusiasm. A visitor counter, a guestbook, an under-construction GIF, a MIDI file set to loop. It was the last time the default assumption was that you could make a page, not that you shouldn't.
Installation
Not possible. The servers were shut down.
Usage
Visit the archived copies instead. The Internet Archive preserved a large portion of the site before the lights went out.
Search for a username, a neighbourhood, a ~tilde path. Many pages are there, frozen at their last edit, counter still running if you squint.
Known issues
- All content was deleted by the host on 26 October 2009.
- Japan's GeoCities lasted until March 2019. It is also gone.
- Nothing is being maintained. There is no issue tracker.
- The guestbook is closed. It has been closed for a long time.
Contributing
You cannot contribute to GeoCities. You can contribute to the idea it stood for: make a page. Put it on the web. Say something only you would say. The neighbourhood is not accepting new members, but the internet still is.
License
GeoCities content belonged to its authors, not to the platform. Most of it was never licensed for reuse. The pages that survive in the archives exist because someone thought they mattered enough to save.
This README is licensed under the only licence the situation allows: memory.