I never used Geocities, but I can't help agreeing that even if Yahoo! is going to discontinue the service, they shouldn't let all that content just drop into the bit bucket of history.
It’s cute and pithy to say “Well, good fucking riddance to Geocities”.… Many pages are amateurish. A lot have broken links, even internally. The content is tiny on a given page. And there are many sites which have been dead for over a decade. But please recall, if you will, that for hundreds of thousands of people, this was their first website. This was where you went to get the chance to publish your ideas to the largest audience you might ever have dreamed of having.… In a world where we get pissed because the little GIF throbber stays for 4 seconds instead of the usual 1, this is all quaint. But it’s history. It’s culture. It’s something I want to save for future generations. – Jason Scott
Geocities is one of the sites I didn't try, although I had Xoom, AngelFire, and some generous net-friends. (My first site came from a very generous friend who not only lent me space, but boxed me in the ears til I agreed to learn something about linux, and opened his computer up so that I could.) As I recall, though, about every other link in a search list was geocities. Granted, about half of those were virus traps or script-kiddies, but some were actually trying to spread their knowledge.
I know first hand what it is to have your content held hostage and then dropped off the ether cliff. Jason and Charles make a point. It is history, its our history (as the group that watched the net grow up), and Yahoo has made enough money they can afford the space to set up an archive.
The history on Geocities is not important so much because it's many people's first experimental web presence, it's important because of the content of the pages themselves.
There are fan-pages on Geocities for 90s bands which are not replicated anywhere else; reviews of gigs long past which still may turn out to be significant in music history. Much more in a similar vein totally unrelated to music.
For that information to be lost would be tragic; hopefully most of it is on archive.org.
No, it's important equally much for the content as the fact it's the first time many people used the web and wanted to be a part of it. The process of human beings coming online and being given a potential audience of millions is a specific and unique situation in human history, and should be captured.
The content definitely has things nowhere else and people have linked to them over the decades, and it would be good to bring that along, but I do honestly think it has to be accounted for for the unique event more than the content. We're losing content by the gigabyte every second on the net.
My Father has had websites on Geocities for years… and now he is totally bummed. I did some searching and found geocitiesrescue.com and then contacted them about what they were doing… they totally transfered my dads stuff over to a really affordable paid hosting service for him.
Just thought I would share the link.