Geocities – The original social networking site

Geocities – The original social networking site. Every now and again I’ll take a trip down memory lane and look at all of the things on the internet that used to be but are no longer.

During today’s voyage through the 90’s internet I discovered GeoCities again for the first time via Restorativland.

Restorativland is in the process of bringing things like GeoCities back to life.

today we're launching https://t.co/TLBG38lJPi, a new and modernized geocities archive portal that's built for web surfing

– visual gallery of all sites, sorted by neighborhood
– 5.7 ~million~ pages from the early 1990s to 2009
– restored WAV/MIDI playback

enjoy pic.twitter.com/MPKKg3J920

— restorativland (@restorativland) January 22, 2020

So far the work they are doing is incredible — visit the GeoCities Gallery here: https://geocities.restorativland.org/

Since the sites were created by people from every walk of life, each site had its own down to earth hometown feel that reflected the personality of each author. In a way, it was so much better than the cookie cutter, narrative controlling, social networking sites that we have today. Social networking sites today, in their two dimensional and homogenized way, are seemingly more tasteless and bland.

GeoCities was active in the U.S. from 1994-2009 (until 2019 in Japan).

It gave everyone a good shot at presenting themselves to the world.

It hosted tens of millions of personal websites at its peak, and yes, quite literally everyone was there. From the housewife that lived down the street, to the vacation photos, to tutorials on how to fix things, to social clubs and organizations, and yes, even to the conspiracy theorists.

Everybody was there.

I don’t know about any of the rest of you, but I could easily spend hours poking around in the archive just looking at stuff.

GeoCities shows us all just how much fun the internet used to be.