Share ur site manifesto!

[poesu]

i went ahead and wrote a short one here

Loving it! It's very relatable.

Also "THIS SITE WAS DESIGNED FOR AN ADULT AUDIENCE (ME)" on your splash page cracked me up I think it's the first splash page I'm actually enjoying, and I've perused like hundreds of websites so far.

My about me turned into a website manifesto.

Ahhh, the good olde days of Paint.net!

I heard from someone else that their website used to have fun games for kids. Now it's only a store.

Literally the saddest thing I've read today. I can't even put my feelings into words. It's… tragic, however dramatic this word might be for this kind of situation.

The closing phrase of the manifesto is just brilliant. It's kind of a joke on its own, but you truly gave it a beautiful meaning.


Here's my own manifesto (yep, it begins with Melon's quote, haha). And I've just updated it, making it even more hefty After that there goes my art manifesto, and it kinda expands on my overall (pretentiousness incoming) lIFe PhiLOsoPhY.

[two-reeler]

Here's mine. It was one of the first things I wrote for my website.

Hello and welcome to my Neocities page. My intent for this page is for it to serve as my long-term, ever-evolving refuge from the continued enshitification of the internet. As I’m sure others who seek out oases such as Neocities or Nekoweb are aware, the internet of the ‘90s and early 2000s, Web 1.0, bears little resemblance to the products packaged today for us by Meta, Google, Reddit, X, or Bluesky.

Web 2.0 offers convenience and accessibility, but these qualities come at a cost. We’ve relinquished the responsibilities of creation, curation, and even the discovery of websites to tech bros trafficking in packaged hubs offering one-stop shops for friendships, news, and entertainment. Social media platforms that promised to connect us instead seek to entrap and commodify our attention. And oh boy, entrap and commodify are exactly what they've done. 

Spend enough time with Meta, Google, or Amazon, and the algorithm is sure to notice. In no time, your feeds will be inundated with more and more of your interests. There’s never been a stronger recommendation system, one tailored to your ego and designed to feed you content to keep you engaged, scrolling, and purchasing for as many hours a day as possible. If that weren’t bad enough, the algorithms shepherd us into camps, anger us with rage-bait, and turn us against one another, for little reason other than to increase the time we spend glued to and spending money on these platforms. While we lose our time, money, and empathy to this entrapment, the few companies who monopolize the web are fattened at our expense.

With the pervasiveness of the smart phone, these tech bros have unwittingly unleashed the real-life analog for Orwell’s telescreen—a device used to pacify, stupefy, and enrage the population. However, even Orwell hadn’t considered that the real thing would do all of this while simultaneously draining the people’s purse in the process and contributing to levels of consumption driving Earth’s sixth mass extinction. Worse yet, all of this promises to deteriorate further, even exponentially, as those same tech bros decide it's time to force yet another technological “advancement” down our throats with the proliferation of artificial intelligence driven by large language models.

With knowledge of Web 2.0’s very real harms, I’d predictably like to excise it from my life. However, as someone for whom the phrase “terminally online” would apply, I’m not ready to say goodbye to the entirety of my virtual existence just yet. As hard as it may be to admit, the internet has long been and continues to be an integral part of how I experience human culture.

As such, I’ve come to Neocities searching for the ghosts of websites past. Not yet touched by the rot of late-stage capitalism, the internet I remember was a place of experiment and exploration. It was a place inundated with personality. Websites served as both information reservoirs and digital art installations. They gave users a glimpse into the creator’s inner space in a manner unlike any other medium before. Features and attractions could be completely superfluous. Utility was optional. Web pages were the manifestation of the ego molded by their creators and filtered through seizure-inducing gifs, tinny chiptunes, and low-res waifus.

In seeking this past, I wish to return to a period where my internet usage focuses on creation, not mindless consumption. I want the internet to again be in service of my interests, instead of me in service of its. While I’m sure this website will also become a distraction, it will, I hope, become a catalyst for the craft of art and written pieces that might otherwise have remained in my head—a place with a definite expiration date within the next 70 or so years (likely fewer if global trends continue). But even beyond leaving my mark, I just want to be engaged in the act of creation. I am, after all, my happiest when I am doing so. What more can we want from life but happiness?

[solsgarage]

My manifesto is... not short at all unfortunately LMAO

Here is the preface, you can read the rest here :-)

--

It is undeniable that the modern “manifesto”, as seen on both indie web-pages and political posters alike, is intrinsically associated with some amount of radical or progressive ideologies. This is no exception, and I have no interest in pursuing a milquetoast list of liberal talking-points and ambitions.

My goal is not only to create a raison d’être for the existence of my website, but to justify the need for independent and decentralized communities online. What seems niche now was once commonplace, whether due to a lack of resources or untainted wonder and curiosity about a newly emerging digital landscape. I am under no illusion that we can “take back” that environment, for the same reason that historical re-enactments will never be perfectly accurate. Too many factors have changed globally, both online and off.

Instead, I think that the independent web can—and should—be our first step towards reclaiming a genuine community of peers, free of corporate interest and influence. We have reached a point of no return in regards to the ad-ridden, profit-driven, AI and bot manipulated, jungle that we find ourselves in. It is very likely that the old growth is gone forever—but we have the power to plant new trees.