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. With all that being said, this is worth checking out if you feel like you can keep a cool demeanor.
- 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 (yeah I caught whiff of some drama). 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.
- tilde.town (Hosting): This one requires a bit more "computer competency" to use as everything is done via the ssh protocol, but it's just as good as other web hosts, albeit a lot more niche.
- Bitview (Video sharing): A website that simulates old YouTube.
- KamTape (Video sharing): The same as above, but owned by different folks.
- SpaceHey (Social Media): A place that simulates the experience of using old-school myspace.
- Gigablast (Search engine): A search engine from the year 2000. Extremely old, but still reliable!
- 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...
- Fark (News): Very old user-generated news aggregator
- Lobste.rs (News): Very old user-generated news aggregator
- Hacker News: User-generated news aggregator, tech-related.
- Stacker News: News aggregator
- Vuink (News): Social Link Aggregator
- web1.0hosting.net (Hosting) + z00m.ws (Search Engine) + mail.w10.host (Email): A yesterweb-inspired web 1.0 host that also has an email service and a search engine. Pretty interesting might I add.
- Techmeme (News): News aggregator specifically for happenings in the tech world. Many mentions of Ai should be noted.
- goeshard.org (News): News aggregator that's a tad bit more edgy and permissive, but is otherwise fine to bookmark.
- scangine.com/news/ (News): News aggregator
- freewha.com (Hosting): Yet another option
- freeservers.com (Hosting): Freemium with ads or for as cheap as 5.95 per month you can have a fast working site.
- fulptube.rocks (Video sharing): Not recommended only because it's small and only moderated by one person who may or may not be a minor (kinda giving off vibes), but it's always an option.
- escargot.chat (Messaging): Inspired by MSN Messenger and maybe Skype.
- bubbles.town (News): News aggregator
- ytoo.org (Search engine): Indexes old websites
- winclassic : Classic Windows enthusiasts
- rw-designer : Same as bove, but with custom skins
- wincustomize : Same as above
- winworldpc : Directory and archives of older windows software
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.
- Tumblr (Social Media): There is a surviving yesterweb community and unlike other 'modern' sites, the css is customizable, so tumblr can still be pretty nostalgic if you want it to.
- Archive.org (Archival): You can find old websites and old gifs on it.
- Pixel Joint (Community): It is an edge case because the pixel aesthetic might be a side-effect of the website being both old and about pixel art (else I could go on forever, why not add inkbunny and furaffinity to the list because they look dated right?), but it was actively being promoted by Malonking of melonland.net, so I said sure why not? It has the same problem as Newgrounds where it's a merotocracy and if your art ain't good enough it gets shelved.
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, since 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 and that's what I'm doing here for you right now.
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 either because they are used for spam like disposable email (which is ironically a more appropriate use of "...@fuck.me" than sending and receiving emails between friends), and the users are typically shitlords themselves, so they end up abusing the ever-loving fuck by registering a ton of email addresses and then using those to register on forums.
- 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 aside from the porn threads. It's full of trolling and just angry people with the occasional actual zoophile/pedophile like that 2b guy and some other crazy personalities schizoposting about boogeymen. Avoid these horrible sites at all costs seriously.
- 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. It pretty much built a culture not too dissimilar from /pol/ with a general hyper-conservative slant.
- Kippykip Network (Forum): Freeze Peach absolutism chuds including the owner this time. Otherwise, pretty much identical in purpose to Comfybox. You use this forum to archive stuff or leak stuff whatever. I mean, it exists I guess, but I wouldn't personally recommend it for obvious reasons.
- Vidlii (Video sharing): It's completely and utterly fucked in the ass. It has UTTP weirdos, racist weirdos and other "nice individuals". In addition to a toxic community, it sucks because the humor is stuck in 2016, 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
- 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)
- Bluedwarf.top (News): News aggregator, I heard bad things about the community, so that's that. Take it more as a caution than a full-on "no, don't use it".
- SomethingAwful (Forum): Need I say more? Everybody knows how infamous SomethingAwful is right?
- Lipstick Alley, Kiwifarms, rdrama.net, "snark" subreddits and any other gossip forums: Maybe there are some exceptions, but the reason these places suck is because they actively spread misinformation and are usually just for very low-hanging fruit incels and shitlords who may or may not commit a crime irl when they get bored of doxxing nobodies just because they are trans or autistic. By their very nature they are nasty places that have no redeeming quality outside of catching 1 pedophile/zoophile for every 10 innocentswho were abit too annoying. Now, you might be wondering why I bring them up? It's simple, they occasionally crossover into the yesterweb community, kiwifarms for example has an entire thread dedicated to the yesterweb that may get indexed by search engines. They also archive stuff and talk about linux and old stuff, things that may be commonplace or relevant in this community.