Maria Makes a Manifesto

old millennial yells at cloud

I grew up in the ‘golden age’ of the internet – after years of Geocities my friends and I graduated to buying our own domain names and webserver spaces in the late 90s. We all taught ourselves HTML and CSS basics by reading the source codes of websites we liked, copying what they did, and then modifying accordingly.

And then as time went on we gave that craft and ownership to corporations, and the internet became completely crap.

So, I created this website in 2026, mainly to try and contribute to a revival, however modest, of the internet I dearly miss and want to see again.

In my view, too much of the awesome spectrum of human activity is being over-optimized and hyper-monetized, incentivized by social media companies and just made worse by, well, capitalism. It kills me that so many practical life skills (which are nowadays hobbies for many of us) are becoming more inaccessible simply because the skills aren’t being taught, and the materials and tools needed are become way too expensive. You can buy a several-thousand-dollar sewing machine, but an entry-level one to learn on? Hard to find, if you can find a physical store to even try one out at (RIP Joann’s now and forever). It’s tough out there!

Websites that made a pretty penny on OUR ‘user generated content’ are shutting down left and right, social media sites push only the most polished and optimized/monitized creators to our eyes, there is very little space anywhere for people who love to create/craft/make/tinker to show off what they’re working on for nothing but the joy of it. Very little space… except on the fringes.

So welcome to the fringe of the internet. Or welcome back to it - for those of us who can still remember those days. Angelfire, blink tags, autoplaying MIDI files, guest counters… some of it best left behind, but maybe some bits are worth keeping. Certainly the spirit of it all is. I still remember, I am still here, and I’m staking my claim.

Here it is, here’s my mess.

~ maria