Like clockwork, Neocities kept on breaking at least once a year without notice (I usually get notified by third-party services that some resource can’t be reached).

This time keybase.io complained that it couldn’t reach the proofs posted there anymore. And indeed the files were not there, not merely unreachable. After I re-triggered the pipeline and checked: The log the .well-known folder and all of its entries should have been properly pushed but were still not there.

Instead of spending hours debugging into this and potentially opening issues with them that never get fixed, I re-checked whether GitLab Pages had started supporting IPv6 since I last checked, and yes while this is not officially documented, according to the ongoing issue you can just point your AAAA records to 2600:1901:0:7b8a:: and it will work.

Neocities used to be the cool kids, with native IPv6 support, IPFS distribution of your content, hassle-free WebDAV access, and their own Ruby client to upload stuff.

But IPFS hasn’t been working for years and nobody seems to be bothered, and I had to replace the Ruby client with a custom shell script when that broke some time ago. I’m just fed up.

After briefly considering hosting the thing on a small shoe box myself, I decided to test the waters by porting a small landing page of mine to see if it works, and it just did:

  1. Changed the GitLab Pipelines deployment
  2. Enabled GitLab Pages and added the Domain
  3. Redirected the DNS records
  4. Validated the Domain ownership

And off I went. Let’s encrypt automatically picked up the domain and created a matching cert.

Neocities always had atrocious SSL Labs Scores, and GitLab Pages isn’t any better, but this will have to do for now. At least until I get fed up with the current setup again and end up self-hosting again.