<story><title>The Small Website Discoverability Crisis (2021)</title><url>https://www.marginalia.nu/log/19-website-discoverability-crisis/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kyledrake</author><text>Neocities (disclosure: I work on it) has taken steps to try to improve small personal web site discoverability, which ends up being like a platform for people making web sites with a hybrid social component &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;neocities.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;neocities.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I like the idea of calling this the small web, I usually go with something like &amp;quot;personal web site&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;home pages&amp;quot; but it&amp;#x27;s never quite stuck for me. I hope they&amp;#x27;ve added Neocities to the Kagi small web search because there&amp;#x27;s some pretty incredible sites available for that and our compiled sitemap will make importing easy: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;neocities.org&amp;#x2F;browse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;neocities.org&amp;#x2F;browse&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The framing for this stuff is usually something like &amp;quot;wow remember the crazy 90s web&amp;quot; nostalgia pieces or &amp;quot;this is an active resistance against Facebook come join us in the lonely space nobody goes to.&amp;quot; But really there&amp;#x27;s some incredible, magical content that requires the canvas the web provides, that isn&amp;#x27;t on the social media super-platforms and people very much still use the web to access them. Neocities alone serves hundreds of millions of views per month across all the sites, there&amp;#x27;s still a lot of web surfing going on.&lt;p&gt;I would actually argue that having a web site gives you &lt;i&gt;more&lt;/i&gt; exposure for your content than an average social media account, because sans a few lucky accounts, most are being throttled and limited by weird algorithms to prevent people from seeing your content organically. Your google search ranking might not be great, but people share links all over the place, including in private channels (think Slack&amp;#x2F;Discord&amp;#x2F;IRC&amp;#x2F;IMs) and you can still get meaningful distribution of your content this way.&lt;p&gt;To paraphrase @izs &amp;quot;if you build it, they will come&amp;quot;, is a misquote from a Kevin Costner movie about baseball ghosts, but if you build a good site with good content, people do just magically show up through mechanisms I don&amp;#x27;t myself quite understand yet. It&amp;#x27;s pretty cool to see new sites on Neocities that are unusually interesting and know they&amp;#x27;ll organically get view counts into the millions before it happens.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hinkley</author><text>Re: Field of Dreams&lt;p&gt;If you look at this story from anyone else’s perspective, right up until the last few moments this is a story about a man with untreated schizophrenia or temporal lobe seizures escalating his illness to the point of kidnapping someone and transporting them across state lines.&lt;p&gt;Almost every company in the dot com boom was convinced the headlights at the end of their story would be vindication, not the ambulance coming to take them to a psychiatric ward. Almost all of them were wrong.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Small Website Discoverability Crisis (2021)</title><url>https://www.marginalia.nu/log/19-website-discoverability-crisis/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kyledrake</author><text>Neocities (disclosure: I work on it) has taken steps to try to improve small personal web site discoverability, which ends up being like a platform for people making web sites with a hybrid social component &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;neocities.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;neocities.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I like the idea of calling this the small web, I usually go with something like &amp;quot;personal web site&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;home pages&amp;quot; but it&amp;#x27;s never quite stuck for me. I hope they&amp;#x27;ve added Neocities to the Kagi small web search because there&amp;#x27;s some pretty incredible sites available for that and our compiled sitemap will make importing easy: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;neocities.org&amp;#x2F;browse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;neocities.org&amp;#x2F;browse&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The framing for this stuff is usually something like &amp;quot;wow remember the crazy 90s web&amp;quot; nostalgia pieces or &amp;quot;this is an active resistance against Facebook come join us in the lonely space nobody goes to.&amp;quot; But really there&amp;#x27;s some incredible, magical content that requires the canvas the web provides, that isn&amp;#x27;t on the social media super-platforms and people very much still use the web to access them. Neocities alone serves hundreds of millions of views per month across all the sites, there&amp;#x27;s still a lot of web surfing going on.&lt;p&gt;I would actually argue that having a web site gives you &lt;i&gt;more&lt;/i&gt; exposure for your content than an average social media account, because sans a few lucky accounts, most are being throttled and limited by weird algorithms to prevent people from seeing your content organically. Your google search ranking might not be great, but people share links all over the place, including in private channels (think Slack&amp;#x2F;Discord&amp;#x2F;IRC&amp;#x2F;IMs) and you can still get meaningful distribution of your content this way.&lt;p&gt;To paraphrase @izs &amp;quot;if you build it, they will come&amp;quot;, is a misquote from a Kevin Costner movie about baseball ghosts, but if you build a good site with good content, people do just magically show up through mechanisms I don&amp;#x27;t myself quite understand yet. It&amp;#x27;s pretty cool to see new sites on Neocities that are unusually interesting and know they&amp;#x27;ll organically get view counts into the millions before it happens.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>StableAlkyne</author><text>I just love how Neocities has webrings. They were such a great way to find content related to the site you&amp;#x27;re currently viewing</text></comment>