{"id":342818,"date":"2021-06-24T07:30:11","date_gmt":"2021-06-24T14:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/?p=342818"},"modified":"2021-11-04T09:21:02","modified_gmt":"2021-11-04T16:21:02","slug":"chapter-9-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/chapter-9-community\/","title":{"rendered":"Chapter 9: Community"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
In April of 2009, Yahoo! shut down GeoCities. Practically overnight, the once beloved service had its signup page replaced with a vague message announcing its closure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways. We will be closing GeoCities later this year.<\/p>
Existing GeoCities accounts have not changed. You can continue to enjoy your web site and GeoCities services until later this year. You don\u2019t need to change a thing right now \u2014 we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We\u2019ll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
In the coming months, the company would offer little more detail than that. Within a year, user homepages built with GeoCities would blink out of existence, one by one, until they were all gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Reactions to the news ranged from outrage to contemptful good riddance. In general, however, the web lamented about a great loss. Former GeoCities users recalled the sites that they built using the service, often hidden from public view, and often while they were very young.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For programmer and archivist Jason Scott, nostalgic remembrances did not go far enough. He had only recently created the Archive Team, a rogue group of Internet archivists willing to lend their compute cycles to the rescue of soon departed websites. The Archive Team monitors sites on the web marked for closure. If they find one, they run scripts on their computers to download as much of the site as they could before it disappears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Scott did not think the question of whether or not GeoCities deserved to exist was relevant. \u201cPlease recall, if you will, that for hundreds of thousands of people, this was their first website<\/em>,\u201d he posted to his website<\/a> not long after Yahoo!\u2018s announcement. \u201c[Y]ou could walk up to any internet-connected user, hand them the URL, and know they would be able to see your stuff. In full color.\u201d GeoCities wasn\u2018t simply a service. It wasn\u2019t just some website. It was burst of creative energy that surged from the web.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the weeks and months that followed, the Archive Team set to work downloading as many GeoCities sites as they could. They would end up with millions in their archive before Yahoo! pulled the plug.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chris Wilson recalled the promise of an early web in a talk looking back on his storied career with Mosaic, then Internet Explorer, and later Google Chrome. The first web browser<\/a>, developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, included the ability for users to create their own websites. As Wilson remembers it, that was the de-facto assumption about the web\u2014that it would be a participatory medium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cEveryone can be an author. Everyone would generate content,\u201d Wilson said<\/a>, \u201cWe had the idea that web server software should be free and everyone would run a server on their machine.\u201d His work on Mosaic included features well ahead of their time, like built-in annotations so that users could collaborate and share thoughts on web documents together. They built server software in the hopes that groups of friends would cluster around common servers. By the time Netscape skyrocketed to popularity, however, all of those features had faded away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
GeoCities represented the last remaining bastion of this original promise of the web. Closing the service down, abruptly and without cause, was a betrayal of that promise. For some, it was the writing on the wall: the web of tomorrow was to look nothing like the web of yesterday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nIn a story he recalls frequently, David Bohnett learned about the web on an airplane. Tens of thousands of feet up, untethered from any Internet network, he first saw mention of the web in a magazine. Soon thereafter, he fell in love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bohnett is a naturally empathetic individual. The long arc of his career so far has centered on bringing people together, both as a technologist and as a committed activist. As a graduate student, he worked as a counselor answering calls on a crisis hotline and became involved in the gay rights movement at his school. In more recent years, Bohnett has devoted his life to philanthropy<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Finding connection through compassion has been a driving force for Bohnett for a long time. At a young age, he recognized the potential of technology to help him reach others. \u201cI was a ham radio operator in high school. It was exciting to collect postcards from people you talked to around the world,\u201d he would later say in an interview<\/a>. \u201c[T]hat is a lot of what the Web is about.\u2018\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some of the earliest websites brought together radical subcultures and common interests. People felt around in the dark of cyberspace until they found something they liked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n