nekoweb review
edited 2025-02-13 @ 21:15
i really wish i used this blog for funny posts but i think this one's necessary. there's a place near and dear to my heart that has severe issues holding it back and i think this post is necessary if i want to see it change for the better.
after using neocities a few years ago, i found out about nekoweb and decided to give it a chance. and so, i hosted my site for six months, while donating $3 a month for support perks during that period. this is my review of nekoweb.
as a host
it's pretty much indifferent from neocities. the only real thing i've noticed is that sometimes the website loading chugs for a solid 5-10 seconds at random, which never happened to me on neocities. the only real perk there is to being a supporter is the endless bandwidth, which is the only real perk that's better than the 3000 GB bandwidth neocities offers, however unless you're a major company you will never hit the 3000GB treshold. basically every perk on neocities is better, even if it's more expensive.even if nekoweb is cheaper, i'd still recommend anything else over it. the rest of the review is why.
as a website (on its own)
like neocities, nekoweb has a social media-lite aspect to it, albeit nekoweb's even more barebones. which is fine, the websites being hosted should be the focus over the the site that hosts it. though you're pretty the front page for new users (or users that aren't logged in) shows the most followed websites, not necessarily the best ones available.the most followed website on nekoweb has lead to a page declaring that the webmaster closed shop. when i first saw that website, i accidentally clicked "follow", which wasn't labeled at all or not even shaped like the [+] button. i had no interest in following that website, especially considering there wasn't much of interest left there since it lead to a "THIS SITE IS DEAD" type page.
while i was somewhat annoyed by this, i decided to check for myself how annoying and exploitable this could be. for a solid 30 minutes, the sitebox that lead to my website had a gigantic, invisible "follow" button. if you were logged in and clicked anywhere that wasn't a link or another sitebox, you would follow my website. in 30 minutes, i got half a dozen people to follow me. i also made it so that the follow button would be completely invisible.
basically, the nekoweb hub incentivizes grabbing users' attention, not by the contents of the website itself, but by how much CSS fuckery you can use to trick them into giving you a follow, so new people can see your site on the first page when sorting by "most followed". doesn't matter how unreadable your website is or how worthless the information on it is, if you can make that sitebox as obnoxious as possible you'll get rewarded. besides that, it's completely useless at best.
the only thing i will give it, is that gaining this system to get your site bumped at the very top in order inflate your ego at least requires you to have creativity. that, and participating in the community. and oh jesus the nekoweb community.
as a community
most of the community aspect of nekoweb is centered around the official discord server. because of fucking course it is. if you're not in that discord, you basically don't get to participate in the community. as you'd expect from a discord server with over a thousand people, it's filled with insufferable teenagers. a lot of them shit on neocities unconditionally, but not for legitimate reasons like neocities having a disappointingly laissez-faire approach to AI, rather because of what seems to be a superiority complex over "not using the main thing" when neocities isn't even really a "main thing" to begin with.and of course, the discord server full of annoying people is the sole reliable method of getting any sort of fucking tech support.
while there's e-mail support, nekoweb's contact page actively promote the discord as being the fastest way you can get any sort of tech support. this discord server is paired with several poorly moderated channels that aren't support related but just server related, and like most large discord servers with over a thousand people, it's populated by very annoying teenagers. the problem is that the "large discord full of stupid teens" actively conflicts with the "tech support" part of the discord that i'm actually here for.
some of the guides related to domains aren't clear, and i haven't touched domains in a few years. so naturally i went in the discord and sent a question. the problem is that the regulars in the discord are mostly attention-deprived, irony-poisoned teenagers, and most of the mods are also these same teenagers. my question would be buried by a completely unrelated conversation that shouldn't have been happening in the support channel to begin with. very rarely can you ask a question without one of these idiots chiming in to give no answer derail completely the question with dogshit memes or just whatever other annoying method they have to vacuum all of the attention in the room. so your question just gets fucking buried and you have to ask again and again until the only person running nekoweb answers you.
it would've been significantly better and more efficient to have a forum section solely dedicated for tech support. instead, nekoweb adopts the "put all of the important downloads" approach, and it's a shitty annoying approach and i hate it. i don't want to join your fucking discord for basic help. i don't want to have to stay in there to have support. or hell, just make e-mails the only viable support method! they still work, just check take some time to check them and then bail! it's really not that complicated!
a short anecdote : a recent thread derailment lead to a regular coming in to shit on me and deliberately misgendering me for the third time, only for one of the mods to give me the boot for correcting that user and calling them a fucking moron. i was only in the server to show off some progress and use it for technical help, but there are so many obnoxious teenagers who derail channels, the moderators do not give a fuck about professionalism because they're too inexperienced to know what that even is.
that lack of professionalism leads me to the final point of this review.
dimden should not be running nekoweb
clarifying ahead : this section relates to dimden, the owner of nekoweb, and not dimden as an individual. i don't know how dimden is outside of nekoweb, this is purely how i feel about him as the person who runs nekoweb.say what you will about neocities, i think their stance on AI is dogshit and goes against its key userbase, but at the very least kyle drake shows enough professionalism that i still trust him to end up making the right decision at the end of the day. dimden is the complete opposite of that, he doesn't give a shit about professionalism and does so in a very cynical way rather than an endearing way. my experience with him from a customer's point-of-view is that he's very easily irritable and he seems ready to boot my ass out of the website solely because i've tried to find exploits with the custom CSS users can put on nekoweb.
let's be real : he's a one-person show and he can't realistically manage both a community discord and the nekoweb project at once. as anyone would do, he decided to make a few members of nekoweb moderators. however he did so by randomly picking who happened to say something he agreed with that day, and made them mods. this is what one of the moderators, who also went on record to say they don't want to be moderators, told me in DMs. two people told me that one of the moderators has been targeting a specifically queer user by misgendering them to piss them off. because they're a mod, nobody wants to speak out, and i was told that dimden was made aware of this and did fuck all about it. considering this is the same guy booted me for calling the user who deliberately misgendered me three times "a fucking moron", i think that this mod has a thinly veiled bias against queer people.
i've mentioned how my personal sitebox on the nekoweb hub tricks people into following me. i pointed this exploit out to dimden, and rather than to say he'd fix the exploit he said i'd get ban on sight. fair enough, but i think it's pretty fucking stupid to just blatantly let users abuse a feature like that. this was followed by a user who joined with a slur in their username, i asked them "why they had a slur in their name", only for dimden to display way more energy into defending how they didn't have a slur in their name, that they didn't say it in the server, etc. than they seem to fix my exploit. after i said my opinion that i think using slurs in public makes you seem like a loser, dimdem accused me of being annoying, the rest of the fucking idiot teenager squad showed up and posted their nonsensical use of this π emoji and then i got timed out.
by curiosity i looked up if anyone really used that slur. discord showed many variants of that word used in ways that weren't meant to be used as a slur, except for two posts from dim. someone joined to question nekoweb's security. i couldn't see these messages because that user got banned, purging their messages. despite that, another user pinged dim to ask him what that was about, only for dimden to dismiss it and call the banned user a "schββo rββββd". this reads to me that if you point out to him any obvious flaw with nekoweb that can be easily exploited, he will insult you and either ban you or time you out rather than patching it. he also seems completely fine with bigotry in his own server, which is pretty fucking disappointing considering how noticeably large the queer userbase of nekoweb is.
take this paragraph with a grain of salt, but i've also heard of rumors about unpaid/uncredited contributions to nekoweb, as nekoweb seems to have taken nearly two years to develop, but the only substantial evidence were discord chat logs of people claiming to be past contributors saying that "people shouldn't use nekoweb". should i find receipts, i'll post them here. honestly these claims aren't substantial enough for me to think they should be a concern, and if they are there's not much that can be done to fix this, or that necessarily affects why i think nekoweb is mediocre.
if nekoweb is to survive, dimden should absolutely not be the sole person running all of nekoweb. he's too easily irritable, is thoroughly unprofessional in a way that hurts the website more than it helps, is unable to manage a large discord server on his own and doesn't have a good judgement on who to trust with moderation powers in the discord.
closing words
with all said and done, i still want to believe in nekoweb. i think most of these issues can be fixed, but it's guaranteed that nothing will be done if they're not mentioned. i do hope nekoweb succeeds, but considering how the owner seems to dislike me on a somewhat personal level, i don't think i'll see any of these issues addressed. i'll most likely swap to neocities.i also don't think there's a moral stance to be had in using nekoweb. you're not a bad person if you use it. but these issues are way too much for me to want to tolerate, so i'll just pay the extra $2 if that means i don't have to deal with any of the aforementioned bullshit.