Before the web was more commercialized, it was personal. In 1994, the web hosting service GeoCities allowed anyone to own a 2 MB parcel of digital land. Handmade and amateur webpages were abundant and unpolished, organized into thematic “neighborhoods” like Napa Valley for wine lovers and foodies, or Silicon Valley for technophiles. At its peak, GeoCities hosted 38 million web pages. A website was a way to represent yourself and connect to others, a space to tend and call your very own.

Today, there are more websites than ever before, but the internet somehow feels more constrained. While new tools have democratized the web, they’ve also flattened it. The imperfect, handmade character of websites has been sanded away in favor of efficiency, and social media platforms have risen in the stead of amateur sites. Many of us conform to these containers and retreat from expressing our authentic selves publicly—what writer and entrepreneur Yancey Strickler calls the ‘dark forest’ of the internet, where genuine expression gives way to self-censorship and fear of judgment.

Yet in certain pockets, a more personal internet persists. Neocities, founded in 2013 to archive GeoCities websites, now offers free hosting services, continuing the legacy of the defunct platform. In the past two years, it’s grown to host nearly a million sites. Institutions like Rhizome, the Center for Net Art, and the School for Poetic Computation hold exhibitions and workshops supporting internet art. Efforts like DWeb, largely supported by the Internet Archive, help actualize a more decentralized and distributed model of the