“I’m gunna blog about this”

That’s exactly what I said to TOFA after telling her that, surprisingly, shockingly, I’d just received an email from a functioning fanlisting in 2025. I clicked away from the email client I’ve been using for more than 20 years to start a post on a website with origins even older.

I had no idea anyone was still running fanlistings. I shut down the ones I ran (around a decade ago?) and took down all my codes because almost all of them were broken links. At the time, TFL had been seemingly dead for a while. At one point, the domain might have expired too. So, color me surprise when, in two thousand freaking twenty-five, I get an email from a functioning fanlisting and TFL is back up.

A quick search suggests that fanlistings might be experience a small rennaiscance due to Neocities, and if I were so inclined, I could visit and comment on some of those sites and find some to link and potentially make new friends. I don’t know if I want to do that per se, but it’s nice to browse, to experience the nostalgia. Yet it’s not just that. Because there’s newer art styles and topics and trends — I see links to Patreon and bandcamp uploads, and references to Youtube that are newer than personal sites like this — but it’s an homage nonetheless. (I wonder if anyone used Lissa Explains to learn HTML/CSS?!).

Some of the Neocities sites feel a bit more grown up, perhaps because they’re people who experiencing this the first time around and want to return to a time before the Internet existed solely to make us miserable and profit off of us. (It’s hard to tell because some of the websites are creatively cryptic, much the same as ours were back then). But some are clearly by people who never lived through that era and are clambering for something, anything, that’s a bit more human and less ~interactive~ than the phones that constantly assault our attention.

Who can blame them?

Pushing back against a time where everyone has the same profile on the social media giants, when everything has to be mobile friendly, and lives can be ruined by the public nature of, well, seemingly everything, with a personal website where you can be as crazy, even ridiculous as you want to and isn’t constantly pinging you? Tastes a little like freedom, I’m sure.

So, I’ll take the guestbooks and custom cursors and tiny text spaces in lieu of mobile slop, thank you very much. And I’ll appreciate the differences, the growth and awareness, that’s displayed on many of these sites without an algorithm shoving it down our gullets and trying to manipulate our emotions with it for ~engagement~.

You know, it’s funny. Back in 2007, when I first joined Facebook, and we could all enter our interests,
I thought, “This is like fanlistings! Now, everyone can show their fandom without having a website.” Oh, how naive I was! That was before companies took over all those interest pages and used them to advertise. Sure, it’s nice to see posts from your favorite band. But let’s be honest: most of what we want to see is hidden, and we’re bombarded with sponsored posts and, for some reason, those from pages or groups we don’t even follow.

It was also before everything on the Internet was written with a space after every two sentences because God forbid someone actually read. I had to force that paragraph together because it’s become so ingrained in me that people have no attention span, which, while true, is only exacerbated by leaning into it.

I don’t really need to spend more time complaining about the Internet. I bitch, I moan, I kvetch. But for a little bit today, I remembered, and it felt like.. home.