Increasing lot sizes of our digital homes - Thinking with portals<br>Thinking with portals<br>Increasing lot sizes of our digital homes<br>From GeoCities to Facebook to Open Social and beyond: a history of digital homes, and a thought experiment for what comes next.<br>Gov

July 28, 2026

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Somewhere between the mid-90s and now, pretty much everyone alive somehow became a homeowner on the internet, a place they return to out of habit most days, if not everyday. The people who built those first homes had a name for themselves: Netizens. And the standards that came with the title were, by today's measure, wildly idealistic.<br>ALT

What is a Netizen?<br>According to Hauben, Netizens are the people who actively contribute online towards the development of the Net and discuss the nature and role of this new communications medium. They also understand the value of collective work and the communal aspects of public communications and promote the communal nature of the Net by:

actively discussing and debating topics in a constructive manner;<br>emailing answers to people and provide help to new-comers;<br>maintaining FAQ files and other public information repositories;<br>maintaining mailing lists.

What is a Netizen? CMC Magazine, 1996<br>We definitely know that this is not the case for a majority of today's internet users, to the point where users who meet all those criteria are saints walking among us. However, given how pivotal the internet has become in this age, it is more than fair to broaden the scope of the term for users discarded by the old definition, such as lurkers, doomscrollers, or even trolls. No matter the benefit or detriment contributed by these users, we still cohabit the internet, and spend up to about a quarter of our days on it.<br>Similarly to how the definition of internet inhabitants has expanded, the size and shape of our homes online have also changed significantly over the years. In the age of the dedicated netizens who painstakingly curated their forums, mailing lists, and bulletin boards, digital homes on the internet were limited to a small number of people; the rest were still getting acquainted with the concept of the personal computer. Those who had the means and motive to go to places on the internet congregated around common interests, like pubs or cafes where they could meet like-minded people across the world that they simply couldn't in their irl surroundings.<br>Then in the mid '90s came one of the first large communal spaces without such high barriers to entry, in the shape of GeoCities. Users were allocated plots of land in the form of HTML pages that they could choose to place in different neighbourhoods of different cities, and suddenly you had a buzzing colony of eclectic content, shaped by users all around the world. It was one of the first times the internet witnessed a congregation of so many internet users in such close proximity to each other – sharing zip codes, if not always sensibilities, with people they'd never have crossed paths with otherwise.<br>ALT

Paris on geocities, with various neighbourhoods such as Arc, Arc, Bistro, Tower

ALT

Bunch of user pages in the Pentagon Camp Geocities page

From the Geocities Gallery.<br>But that came to a stop because of the first iteration of a pattern we'd become all too familiar with, because in January 1999, Yahoo bought GeoCities outright for $3.57 billion, and immediately started acting like the president of a nation they hadn't built. They quietly rewrote the Terms of Service to claim broad, perpetual rights to reuse anything users had posted. What followed was one of the first large-scale internet revolts, with users quitting or defacing their pages en masse until Yahoo ultimately acquiesced to their demands to drop the ToS change.<br>It didn't matter for too long anyhow, because after years of dealing with an acquisition they realised they never wanted, and that they couldn't fit into their product suite, Yahoo announced in April 2009 that GeoCities would shut down. By the end of October the servers were switched off for good, taking an estimated 38 million pages with them. An estimated 7 terabytes of unique, user-generated history – the digital equivalent of millions of personal diaries, photo albums, and manifestos – was wiped out in an instant. While a small fraction was saved by rogue archivists (and exist to this day as a museum absolutely worth visiting), the vast majority was lost forever. It was a cultural extinction event. Understanding this loss is crucial because it's a stark reminder that our digital heritage is incredibly fragile, often held captive by corporate decisions. The photos, blogs, and profiles you create today exist on servers that can be shut down tomorrow, and the "city" you live in could become a ghost town overnight.<br>Facebook, which arrived a few years into GeoCities' decline under Yahoo, had a very different goal than creating a space for people to congregate. Mark Zuckerberg wanted to build the World's Largest Social...