World War Neocities: Providing free web sites to a hostile internet

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Presented at BSidesPortland 2015 by

Kyle Drake

I built Neocities to bring back the idea of people making their own free web sites, because I have this ""crazy"" idea that internet platforms should be about more than just spied on text boxes and pictures of your idiot friends eating ice cream. And also, I think HTML5/JS/CSS3 have re-enabled the idea of making your own awesome, beautiful, expressive web sites. But this isn't the 90s. Web browsers that used to be dumb HTML display windows are now loaded weapons, with AJAX and advanced JavaScript enabling all kinds of nefarious craziness. Not to mention warez dumping, virus distribution, phishing attacks, DDoS attacks, comment and web site spam, controversial security disclosures, and all other sorts of ""fun"" we've had to deal with. Oh, and the 50kb of JavaScript that took down the President of Mexico's web site. Most people thought Neocities would last a month. So did I. But I aggressively worked to solve these problems from day one, and to everyone's amazement (including mine, honestly) we actually succeeded. Now I'm here to show how you can do it too, without resorting to expensive solutions and extra employees. After this talk, you'll have the crash course you need on what it takes to host free content on the hostile internet. And then you'll hear about how we're working to implement the Distributed Web with IPFS, and why I think it's the future of the web.