I think the actual main difference between neocities and old internet is that there's way more people making websites centered on themselves instead of their interests on neocities, kind of comes off as narcissistic imo but it's not a big deal because you can just avoid those. Talking about neocities itself I think it's pretty cool, it does remind me of finding random pages about stuff that interests me or random shit in general back in the 00s, and it's fun to have an accessible way to just fuck around with html and css and have it become public for everybody else to see