Neocities.org

huh, can u explain what happened?

While the Yesterweb community meant well when it came to their desire to change the status quo online, the constant growth of their Discord server had led to countless problems, including the ones that challenged the very values they stood for. To make a long story short, Sadgirl (the web mistress of the Yesterweb community) and the admins decided to shut down the discord server. For good.

oh i knew that part, i was on their discord but then the forums died down too? how come

Perhaps a lack of interest? I'm not entirely sure...

the webring had an overwhelming amount of members for them to manage (I think it was like, over 5,000 members?I can't recall properly)

not just the webring but just about every aspect, from the discord to the forums somehow, had more members than they were willing to manage, despite pushing for a desire for a thriving community

former mod here - we go over it in the manifesto but in short, we felt that the community was growing too large and too divergent from what we thought was productive or healthy and the emotional toll it was taking on the moderation team was vastly outweighing any positives we saw from the community.

it was less about what what we were willing to manage and more about the fact that we simply couldn't continue at the rate we were going, we had made a lot of mistakes and felt that it was going to be extremely difficult if not downright impossible to course correct. cutting our loses felt like the best decision for not only us considering the fact that a lot of us were struggling with burnout and fatigue, but

for the community as well considering it was clear that what we were doing wasn't working or making the environment we truly wanted to foster.

what was the first? districts?

Basically looks like a hobbyist website in which the truth was trying to make it a radical political movement instead. They got mad that people didn't get it because the people were "Hobbyist website go brrrr" and finally ended up being blunt about it. Which caused things to finally shut down. To this day at various places, Yesterweb ended up being a laughing stock cause of it.

I joined Yesterweb's webring some time ago because at the time it advertised itself as a hobbyspace for passionate personal site creators, and I thought that was a really cool concept! At some point, I left the Discord after a while because it was indeed getting obnoxiously political and it was difficult to even ask innocuous questions about coding without eggshells getting broken.

If there were different people at the helm, or if they kept the entire project as politically neutral as they could, I'm sure Yesterweb would still be thriving. We can take Yesterweb's story as yet another cautionary tale of what happens when personal interests are prioritized over the original vision of a thriving project.

I look at it this way: since they've dropped the nostalgia/hobbyism focus, continuing to exist as 'Yesterweb' is useless/confusing. In hindsight, this probably should've happened a year ago when the mission of the staff (foster mass societal change, apparently?) started to diverge from that of the users (assist with website creation and socmed deprogramming)

I do rather agree. After hobbyism wasn't the focus as much anymore, it seemed like it lost its way.