I made my home page like MySpace:
Because it used to be the internet was fun and centered on making stuff yourself and sharing with others. Just like geocities allowed. But now a lot of it all seems like the people making things want to sell things and this has been done at the expense of having spaces for non profit seeking creativity. This is also why I made https://rainy-city.com. Sorry for the self promotion but I really want people to create more stuff like this. Just fun things to find on the internet.
That's, er, definitely not where I expected this to be leading.
Although I guess the PyPI username was a hint.
I think they're trying to get some sympathy (and promotion) with a project that seems inherently human, as the "old web" was, but it's slop all the way down. And people are falling for it.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810/
Background info: https://www.downes.ca/post/50539
Nothing wrong with nostalgia, but I agree with you that the wrong things are being equated here. A tool that just quickly generates a visually-similar site to that somewhat-imagined "old internet look" isn't really the same. If you emulated a similar amount of friction to those old site with modern tooling, you'd end up with an actual spiritual successor to those geocities sites. (NeoCities [1] is a great example, a lot of personal sites on there are not targeting 90s-2000s nostalgia even if that's an obvious aesthetic direction to go for something called "NeoCities")
Bonus points for side navigation bars that were an iframe so you didn’t have to copy paste the same sidebar code across your multiple pages.
* support limiting to 33.6 kbps, 14.4, etc for real nostalgia
* Add an initial "dial-up" sound and "connect" button that matches those for different speeds (I'll be able to tell the speed by just the sounds, so no cheating!)