FRANDSZK/MANIFESTO.HTML
for the remainder of this page, i use the words "internet" and "web" interchangeably. the world wide web is the vast, interconnected net of public website and information, accessed through the internet. it ranges from facebook and twitter to neocities and way back machine. there are good and bad parts, just like any part of life. but what if it could be better?
growing up, i used my mother's old computer. my father's job was computer-based, so he got a new one every couple years, his old one would go to my mother, and her old one would go to me. my internet access was pretty limited, and i only got an hour a day. i spent most of my time playing animal jam and girls go games, though the human interaction i got through the former was always more interesting to me. life was simple, the internet seemed small but endless.
in fifth grade, a girls who code program at the local library introduced me to scratch, and all the sudden i had the power to create my own games. i ended up mostly using the platform for art, and made my first internet friends. i eventually graduated to deviantart, along with many of the friends i had made on scratch, and got my first art program, instead of sloppily drawing with a trackpad inside the scratch image editor. the internet was getting bigger, and so was i.
but then wix bought devianart, and more of my friends left the platform. the customizable boxes i had worked so hard to code were now obsolete, replaced with a slick, modern ui. i began using instagram more, stressing to finish more art so i could post daily and satisfy the algorithim gods. art stopped making me happy, and the numbers didn't seem to change.
in the corporate marketplace of social media we see today, there is little customizability. you can upload a profile picture, maybe a banner, and write in your bio. the boring white or black theme seemed to wash out any picture, no matter how colorful. tumblr was still the most customizable, but coding themes was more complicated than the simple custom boxes i was used to. human interaction seemed so much harder, and the effort it took to actually build friendships seemed too much work.
the unhuman algorithims aren't made to help us, they are here to make a profit for those who control them. the increasingly capitalistic hellscape of the internet. nfts and cryptocurrency continue to grow, and the idea of web3 seems fast approaching.
but i don't want a completely commercialized, exploitative, bland internet. i want strange, small indie websites made from passion. neocities is that for me: a community of weird people making weird sites. it's nice here, the interconnected web of personal websites that feel nostialgic yet futuristic as the same time.
i, being the webmaster of my own personal site that you are currently looking at, am a strong proponent of personal webpages. different social media is made to support different types of content (instagram, for example, is for image and photo content), but a personal webpage can be anything and everything you want it to be.
there are a couple links already within the previous text to other pages i think better explain certain topics, but here's a whole bunch more:
other manifestos:
html/css resources:
on social media/modern internet:
this page will probably end up getting updated/rewritten later in the future. thank you for reading, and have a great day!! (2022/03/11)