to my yet-unknown friend, the reader ...

disclaimer:

the indie web manifesto is a staple on a lot of sites. we're completely right to want the creative control and freedom from omnipresent corporations that the www. used to promise, the same way that we're right to want free housing and safe medical care and to not be ruled by a billionaire pedophile overclass. the free web you can at least admit publicly to planning to bring back through your own efforts without going to jail. if you came here to view my opinion on how neocities is good for that because you misread the title, fear not! scroll to the bottom and you can find where i tucked it away.
 
no, this is my antiweb manifesto. being online in any social format has done things to me best described by making you read junji ito's enigma of amigara fault. if this resonates with you in any way because you also experienced the unique online nightmare of absolute isolationist neglect without any expectation of privacy... well, you may also benefit from this new thing i'm trying! it can't be worse than the alternative!

what we want:

to be left the fuck alone without having to stop participating in the things we enjoy! to share creative efforts and fun interests and normal compliments with people without having to turn every oomf into a friend! seperation of church and state! fake names on the internet being normal and accepted and never having to break kayfabe! being completely unfindable if you decide to last online six months ago something you previously adored without worrying that the people you shared the hobby with will re-enact the go devilled eggs thread about it.
 
we want discord to explode. we want twitter to rate limit you back down to 140 characters and ten tweets a day. we want mass influencer suicide. we want your social media to lock you out of it if you hit a certain level of renown or views or followers without that essentially bankrupting and killing everyone who currently streams / advertises / e-begs for their income on those platforms. we want to live a paranoid lunatic's final dream of nobody being able to see your features or read your url or track you between posts or cite your own past to you or rank you based on how good you are at pandering to an algorithm that is openly hostile to messy human life.
 
when i mute someone i want it to kill them and when someone mutes me i want it to kill them! i want a pony! i want to go to the store for milk and never come back! i want to move to the other side of the world and change my name to dora hand and to do it a thousand more times! i want a second pony! i want dms to stop existing entirely and i want every social media site to ban asking for your location or your phone number or your email and re-instate twitter circles and mutuals-only replies and that thing instagram tried for a week where you could have a secret smaller instagram inside your main instagram and i want them to ban usernames entirely for a few years! and i want everyone to have the things wrong with me that makes that my idea of paradise so they like it too, yippee!

why we want it:

TEMPORARILY REMOVED UNTIL LEGIBLE
 
antiweb 2.0 notes: ai (+ bots), algo, seeing a 14yos opinion, fandom hell (racism illiteracy shipcourse), coke rant about my enemies that segues into estalking / lolcow culture / paranoia, anhedonia about posting, romanticization of the past, discussion of hard politics

how we plan to achieve this:

from my notes again as i begin to earnestly flag: straight up just not talking to people any more, blocking all of my friends friends who i dislike, getting into stuff nobody else gaf about and then refusing to join communities for that thing. i say it's not easy and i mean it. for the last part of a decade i've functionally given up on it. i have friends who have seen me through the aforementioned falling outs and who have stuck by me (and i'm lucky for every one of them, and floored that i can count that many people as being close friends even when i do ghost on them) but i've almost... stopped looking entirely for new ones.
 
i like having mutuals. i like talking to people. but i don't think i want anything that involves any degree of responsibility to someone else, or something that requires me to lean on someone and just hope that this is the time i don't get dropped face-first onto the concrete. intellectually i know that that's a result of disordered thoughts and personality issues, but they're not something i'm able to cure and i don't have it in me any more to get yelled at by someone who thought that hanging out with them would be the thing that fixed me for real.
 
i'm tired of being the tiger, but i'm also tired of telling people that i'm a tiger in an attempt to head that off and then getting my ass beat because they assumed i was lying about it for clout? or because they viewed themselves as the tiger king and didn't like that i'm not actually a tameable animal. or they thought being a tiger would be really cool and sexy so they tried to do it back to me and then i called them a weird mean bitch who sucked to hang out with (i'm not like, unaware of the fact that those things are true about me. i just think that if people insist they're opting in they aren't allowed to act surprised later on. i've been as upfront in those conversations as i have been in this elaborate murder-suicide note and i don't actually view it as incompatible with being surface-level friendly to people i want to sail quietly beside.)
 
if this has read like a list of petty interpersonal beefs that i caused and-slash-or deserved, grandinoise self-importance, delusions of competence, or like something you'd see in a dream and not understand when you woke... well, yeah. probably. i also wrote it at five in the morning because i have debilitating insomnia, which would be a better defense if i hadn't planned it out stone cold sober off of 9 hours restful corpse imitation.

& from your imperfect but fond companion

too long, didn't read.

mindfulness exercise.

i met the love of my life on the computer. i made art, published poems, learned how to write and wrote lots of horrifically bad mush with my friends that i loved every second of. i developed a pavlovian response to the skype ping. i learned how much i loved pixels on deviantart. i coded my tumblr themes until they looked awful and then i added autoplay to them. i typed with a quirk Just Like Vriska Does. i made friends who materially saved my life multiple times over the better part of a decade. i found people who made me better and i found people who made me like where i already was. i read things that made me cry and things that made me furious pissed off (but in a fun way) and things that made me absolutely insane. i found musicians that changed my life years after they'd been anything and years before they ever blew up. i'm alive and i like myself and i've been creatively fulfilled and challenged and as i write this i'm sitting on an ikea sofa with my soulmate and our cats on a completely different continent to the one i grew up on, and that's all because of that damn phone.

actual indie web manifesto.

the free web manifesto is obviously an important and personal piece of writing, so i had to take a whack at it. it has never been harder to use the worldwide web without being snowed in by adverts and bot farms and everything else in that genre (all of which are propped up by what is essentially slave labour done by some of the most vulnerable people in deeply disadvantaged countries), and the barrier for meaningful human connection to someone who isn't a salivating nazi has never been higher if you're trying to find it within the extremely narrow confines of what social media apps will tolerate.
 
your presence online should be something that only you have any say in creating and it's very relevant to that fact that everyone's fondest memory of being online is learning to code for neopets or deviantart or tumblr (to date myself) because of what that freedom to create means. janky code and pointless pages and bewilderingly bad aesthetic taste are important to me. they're real and they're honest and they're full to the brim with (frequently very pissed off and frustrated) love.
 
i've revised my little picnic basket sixteen times in the last three months and every time i finish i find new ways i want to change it around to better suit me. there's no end to what you can make if you're actually allowed to make things. that's what the free web should be. not astroturf hate campaigns against a random woman every week and white house aura edits and the omnipresent spectre of mastercard's disapproval teaching kids to call sexual assault "grape" and pushing online sex workers back onto the streets. it should be about the things you love and about connecting with strangers you have more in common with than anyone you know in real life.