arjache

Rachel Stantz

@arjache

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A one-person oral history of Geocities HTML Chat

Geocities HTML Chat has been forgotten by the world. It is possible I am the only one who remembers it. I only half remember it. It was my first Internet community.

Here is what I remember.

Background

  1. Geocities was a formative website for the older millennials who are just barely old enough to remember when the "web browser" was introduced, but not old enough to be adults when it happened. It wasn't a very good site.

    Geocities was the first, or at least biggest, of the "free web hosts" of the early Internet. Anyone could sign up for a pittance-small (5 megabytes? 10 megabytes?) web directory, and FTP up their HTML and GIF files and Geocities would host it raw and unaltered. Geocities sites had the ugliest URLs on the Internet. Each URL consisted of the user's "city", followed by a four-digit number Geocities assigned. The "cities" were broad categories indicating the type of content your site would contain, like "SiliconValley" for computers, "WestHollywood" for LGBT topics, or… "Tokyo"¹. The categories seemed ill-thought-out and lumpy. The existence of "NapaValley" seemed to indicate they believed there would be roughly as many sites about wine as about all computer-related subjects combined.

    These "cities" seem to have been part of a very vague desire to conceptualize Geocities' very basic service (HTTP file hosting) as in fact a collection of communities. The people who made Geocities had some kind of sense the social web would, or could, someday exist. They could smell it, they could feel the heat of the thing in the room with them. They just had no idea what it would look like. Leaping from flat file hosting to something that looks like "social" "media" requires interactivity, and that was just not really available in webtech at that early point. Cross-page communities were things stitched in by hand (like the "webrings" the Mastodon crowd loves so much; these littered Geocities and invariably consisted of 50% dead links). "CGI-BIN" existed, on some sites (not Geocities), but all it could do was generate new flat files, so people largely only used CGI for the most basic purposes: "Guestbooks" where you could leave your name and a bit of text which would be appended to the HTML of the guestbook page; mindlessly simple "counters" which would generate on each load a GIF containing a number one higher than the last one loaded, showing how many people had visited that page.

    If you're old enough to remember this time, you're kind of nodding off at this point in the post. You know all this. But you probably did not know about Geocities HTML Chat, and if you knew it existed and what it was you probably would be actually shocked. I'm not sure you're even going to believe me this was a real thing that existed.