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vaylian | on: Why Gopher in 2026?
What about https://neocities.org/? It's fairly straightforward and gives you the full power of HTML and a free subdomain.

I think the barrier is much more a matter of awareness of how web sites can be created than actual technical limitations.

grumbel | parent
Neocities is just a repeat of Geocities, and like everything else on the Web, it depend s on a third party to keep the service running, and whenever they lose interesting, all the content is lost. Even when somebody archives it, all the links are broken and the content becomes nearly impossible to find.

One of the big problems with the Web is that it's all ephemeral, it not a question of if it breaks, but when and how badly. A book doesn't disappear from your shelves just because the author lost interesting or the publisher goes out of business, but websites disappear from your bookmarks like that all the time. That's what needs fixing.

The other part is HTML itself. You shouldn't need to write raw HTML to write a website. That's the job of the browser. The very first browser that Tim Berners-Lee wrote supported editing, but that got completely lost over the years. A little bit still exist in the form of the 'contentEditable' attribute, but you can't author websites with that all by yourself, as there is no means of saving or publishing the results. No modern browser supports WebDAV either.

goodmythical | root | parent
>it depend s on a third party to keep the service running

Does Nostr address this? Even things like freenet, tor, i2p rely on third parties...just more third parties than the traditional web, with the idea being that more means more uptime and less individual power.

But if you spin up a nostr (or any of the above) relay after the others have shuttered, you'll have no data because there are no peers. Torrents are fairly durable because there's usually at least one peer, but when there isn't, there just isn't.

>A book doesn't disappear from your shelves just because the author lost interesting That's because the book is actually on your shelf. If you have local backups of websites, they don't disappear quite so easily. The web is just the library but on the web - you send a request to borrow, they let you if they have a copy, what you do with that copy is up to you and your legal system.

>You shouldn't need to write raw HTML to write a website wysiwyg editors are better than ever, no? Plenty of themes available to take the burden of CSS off. Plenty of engines to take the pressure of JS off. Even in-browser IDEs and the inspect window if you do want to play with the code.

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