Yesterweb sites directory
If you like nostalgia you've come to the right post.
- Melonland (Service): Genuinely a dope website that has many things to look at and many features like a wiki, an art spot and customizable pages in the "everyone." subdomain. I hope I get to stay on it forever because I love everything about melonland, the aesthetics are immaculate and the community is nice and helpful. However I have an inkling the admins are not only a bit more alert (rather than laid back) but also a bit more strict than other forums I've used in the past and ngl I have had moments where I get overly emotional and passionate about something and that has caused me issues in the past. That also happened on melonland specifically, but nothing came of it because I always try to be polite, but this is why i even feel the need to mention it because that's a bit of pressure on me.
- YellowTealPurple (Forum): An art community focusing on creative works like youtube poops, and while I'm not interested in that sort of stuff you can submit drawings or animation memes if you want. It acts as a general art community basically
- Comfybox (Forum): A furry-friendly archival/leakers community that I'm sure would get a ton of dmca emails if they were more popular. It's pretty chill, though also not super active. It borrows some 4chan humor like making fun of cia agents "glowies".
- 32-bits cafe (Community): A place to join other people and discuss the old net. They have a discord server (EW!) and a discourse forum that discusses the old web, both 18+. Also furry-friendly. I don't think I would recommend it though because discord is involved and it's not particularly pretty. A good thing I can say is I really like their babyfur cat mascot.
- Nekoweb (Hosting): This is what I use for my personal website. It's pretty cool abnd lets you have a ton of control over your stuff. You can post html5 games for your visitors and ssi has recently been added, so the skill floor for newer people joining is much lower.
- Neocities (Hosting): Basically the same thing as nekoweb, but worse.
- Ichi city (Hosting): A small hosting community for small webspaces. I was not able to make an account there because the sign up process is kind of broken though.
- leprd.space (Hosting): A more professional "pay what you can" web hosting provider with custom subdomains off the bat if you can't or don't want to afford a domain name.
- SpaceHey (Social Media): A place that simulates the experience of using old-school myspace.
- Bitview (Video sharing): A website that simulates old YouTube.
- KamTape (Video sharing): The same as above, but owned by different folks.
- Mactrove (Archival): Directory of old software for older mac models.
- Macintosh Repository (Archival): Same as above. Unrelated, but this website would look better with this imo https://sakofchit.github.io/system.css/
- Macintosh Garden (Archival): Likewise...
The ones listed above are the best, most representative of the old web, so now I'll finish this up by adding the remaining that I know of.
Edge cases
Do they count? I'm not sure and I still think they fit the bill enough for my list.
- Filegarden (Cloud): Not sure how much this one counts, but if you don't vibe with Google Drive, you can just use that instead. It's fairly popular in the yesterweb community and has many users.
- Catbox.moe (Cloud): Likewise, but acts more as an anonymous file drop-in and share more than a Google Drive clone.
- Newgrounds (Community): I cannot recommend this one due to the mandatory skill-floor for anything to be accepted on there. There's basically a vague issue where your art needs to be scouted before it appears everywhere or your animation needs to have a minimum rating not to get deleted, I dunno how exactly all of this works, but I don't vibe with meritocracies like that unless at least it's an archival site like e621. Newgrounds is an oldnet website that got updated a lot to meet let's say "current standards" and it has a niche indie community of artists, game devs, musicians and animators that is pretty active i reckon.
Problematic spots
I want my directory to be as exhaustive as possible and I don't think excluding anything is smart since if you know about them you can make your own informed choice on whether you wanna be apart of those communities or not. It's ultimately up to you, but I think it's at least necessary to acknowledge them. I made the grave mistake of signing up to agoraroad specifically the moment I made my first post I knew this forum was rotted beyond repair, but I still tried to engage with it anyway. I would have probably loved being told that a specific website just ain't all that cut out for me so I can avoid it.
Anyway, here they go:
- Any shitposter emails: Like Cockli or Pissmail (it's dead btw, the owner was arrested by the police) are very, VERY eh and if you plan to join other communities the email address domains are oftentimes offensive and they tend to get blacklisted because the users are typically shitlords themselves.
- Agoraroad (Forum): [ex]4chan users. They hate furries and schizopost all day long. The forum is really active, that's the only upside. I think the owner is a nice person based on what I could garner, but in a literal sense not kicking the bad apples out early means that the website's now the way it is and it's a complete cesspit with some extremely unlikable people.
- Kippykip Network (Forum): Freeze Peach absolutism chuds. Otherwise, pretty much identical in purpose to Comfybox. You use this forum to archive stuff or leak stuff whatever.
- Worlio.com (Service): The community's fine, the problem are the owners. Wirlaburla and Bonkmyakr are both kiwifarms users, and no, not to argue or troll the transphobic twerps over there, they actively participated in the community. Though, it's not exactly true anymore because Wirlaburla got banned from kf and later stepped down from administrating Worlio and instead lended his site to Bonkmaykr. So now, you have 1 (mostly inactive) kiwifarms user who runs the site. It's a shame too because Worlio could singlehandedly replace nekoweb, neocities, comfybox, pissmail and so many other things because it's so feature-rich. I also don't think there's anything like it that focuses on worlds.com (metaverse thing that predates vrchat, imvu and second life if you didn't know)
The last one had disgruntled users from the worlds community calling them out before getting banned (happened mostly on discord I heard). I really do not understand why these 2 admins want to die on this hill, but the more power to them I guess.
- Vidlii (Video sharing): It's completely and utterly fucked in the ass. It has UTTP weirdos, racist weirdos and other "nice individuals", as well as the fact it was just getting randomly hacked at some point. I don't remember exactly when, but if I recall correctly it was recent. By some miracle it IS STILL ONLINE, but please just use Bitview instead. My bullet point doesn't do enough justice to how wretched this site is, so for a full on documentary on what's going on with Vidlii, you can watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DLO6u8x1S4
- SomethingAwful (Forum): Need I say more? Everybody knows how infamous SomethingAwful is right?
- Any 4chan clones (Imageboard): Basically 4chan, but sometimes with furries instead, sometimes with bronies instead. I used to be on lulz.net (rip) a ton, but I genuinely don't like the community and stopped coming back. It's full of trolling and just angry people with the occasional actual zoophile/pedophile like that 2b guy and some other crazy personalities. Avoid these horrible sites at all costs seriously.