GeoCities was the wild west of the early internet—launched in 1994, it let anyone build their own free website and “live” in themed neighborhoods like Hollywood, Tokyo, or SiliconValley. By the late ’90s, it was everywhere, hitting millions of users and getting scooped up by Yahoo! in 1999 for $3.6 billion. It had zero guardrails—blinking GIFs, auto-playing MIDI songs, and visitor counters ruled the day. GeoCities was basically Web 1.0’s social media before social media, giving normal people a way to plant their flag online. By 2009, Yahoo! shut it down in the U.S., but if you ever slapped a “under construction” GIF on a page, you get why GeoCities is peak internet nostalgia.