Schiavona's Internet Manifesto

Originally Posted 01/23/2024

This is a living document, and may be updated.

I am very tired.

I suppose the acquisition of Twitter was the straw that broke the camel's back. Back in early 2022 when the first rumblings about how the Muskrat was trying to buy the site started surfacing, I was already beginning to question the worth of social media as a primary online presence. I had already abandoned Facebook a long time ago, which basically left me with Twitter, Tumblr, and Discord. When Musk bought Twitter in October of 2022, I left like a rat fleeing a sinking ship. So that just left me with Discord and Tumblr.

Discord's great with keeping up with friends and all, but it's not really a space you can really call your own (There are a lot of smarter people than me who have written up some very good criticisms of Discord, but that's out of the scope of this article.) Tumblr was a little better, you still had the capability to code your own layout, curate your own feed, but again, you were still at the whims of whoever owned the site at the time, and it's still a site that encourages mindless scrolling, chasing likes and reblogs, and it was generally still some weird mishmash between older web design principles and more modern ones. Honestly if I hadn't been there for well over 10 years at this point, I probably would have left that too.

At this point you're probably thinking "Schiavona were you really just mindlessly scrolling Tumblr and Youtube for like a year before digging this site out of the earth and completely redoing it?" and the answer to that is yes. It wasn't a great experience to be sure, but it did get me thinking about how lifeless our current web environment is. There's no room for real passion, only content to be endlessly churned out, consumed, and those consumption habits analyzed for the benefit of the platform holders. If you make content, you're expected to use it to farm engagement, you're expected to follow the latest trends to keep people engaged with you and what you have to offer. Those youtubers and streamers and artists and writers, as well as the people who engage with their content are all slaves to the platform holders and their inscrutable algorithms in the end.

Oh boy, don't even get me started on the censorship. Now don't get me wrong, I don't think there's really any space for bigotry in this world, but when the things you create are subject to the whims of the platform holders and advertisers, you suddenly find its a lot harder not just to share the things you wanna make, but to share them with like-minded people as well. Since the current social media landscape prioritizes people casting as wide of a net as possible to farm the most engagement, it means people have to water down their output in order to appeal to the widest demographic possible. Your work must be palatable, marketable, safe, in order to get anywhere on Social Media. Oh, and don't forget, if you somehow manage to piss off the platform holder, there goes your presence, your following, basically everything you've worked for. Fun, isn't it?

So what changed?

Well, for like a year, I wasn't really creating anything. I had no passion, no drive. I was fucking exhausted by basically everything. Then I had what the kids call a "Category 7 Autism Event". Feelings I thought had long since died or gotten squashed under the corporatized internet landscape came welling to the surface like an geyser. I began drawing, writing, putting together spreadsheets. For the first time in a while I was MAKING things and excited about the process!

That's when I realized I had nowhere to put any of this stuff to share it with the world, and not have it be washed away in a tidal wave of Social Media Garbage. I didn't want to deal with having to update consistently, chase trends, or aggressively promote my material. I just wanted to make stuff and have a place to share it, preferably a place that wasn't going to decide "Hey your content fucking sucks so no one's gonna see it even if they go looking for it lol." and while personally I don't mind if nobody ever sees what I make, well, it would still be nice to have a place to refer them to in case they did.

That's when I remembered that I signed up for a Neocities account back in 2020 and basically did nothing of consequence with it for a good 3 years because I didn't know a dang thing about HTML or CSS and as a result the site wasn't really up to my standards. I'm sure there's an archive of the old site somewhere on the internet archive. Really it was just a place for me to put info about my Second Life roleplay characters and play stupid midis, it was more an exercise in irony than any genuine attempt to create a website, but it was there regardless. So on January 17 2024, Schiavona's Crystalline Fortress was reborn, and this time I'd use it to say something beautiful and true.

That's great! what are you gonna do now?

You know I think this might be best be broken down into a list.

• Create a space to celebrate my work and interests in an authentic and joyful way.
• Uplift others and encourage them to live more authentically and joyfully.
• Continue to ween myself off the content teat of modern social media and learn to engage with it in a more sustainable manner.
• Cultivate a slower, more mindful web presence to minimize FOMO, both for myself and for those who engage with my work.
• Have a lot of fun!

Let's break it down now.

So to make a long story short, here's what I have to say.

• Social Media sucks and I'm sick of it.
• I made this website to be my true authentic self and share it with folks.
• The internet should be fun and informative (Though not necessarily simultaneously).
• We shouldn't let big corporations and billionaires dictate how we live our digital lives.
• We gotta practice mindfulness in how we interact with Social Media, if we choose to do so at all.

Fun fact, this is the first time I've done most of my own CSS for one of my pages. I figure you might as well practice what you preach, right?

Further Reading

Melon's Manifesto - The main inspiration for putting my manifesto together. Go give them a visit.

Why Social Media Sucks and What We Should Do About It - Although this article is 5 years old, it's a pretty decent resource for curating your digital life

A bunch of other manifestos - Here's a bunch of other manifestos from other independent web developers. They're all interesting reads so take a look!