A week ago, when I was working on my project for HTML Day 2026 I stumbled upon this passage from an essay on blink and marquee tags:
At the time, there was a new breed of web professionals proudly labeled “webmasters.” Part designer, part developer and part evangelist, webmasters held enough esoteric knowledge about the web to manage, edit and create websites, both large and small.
— Jay Hoffman (August 28th, 2017)
And that's when everything clicked for me.
Over the past year, I've written dozens of articles on the Independent Web. Forty-two essays on principles, technical tutorials, accessibility, and advocacy.
And, in a way, it has all been leading to this manifesto. Only through months of research and getting to know many kind and talented people and building things myself have I finally understood the true power of the webmaster.
I think this will be the most important thing I'll ever write, and I wish to share it with you. With everyone.
The earliest webmasters were unauthorized, self-taught, one-person operations. The first webmaster was a woman, Stanford librarian Louise Addis.
It was a few years after Tim Berners-Lee christened the first web server at CERN at the end of 1990, and published the first website info.cern.ch on August 6th, 1991[1].
The webmaster was first understood as the Internet's equivalent to the real-world postmaster.
"Other protocols have defacto standards for well known mailbox names, such as USENET@domain for NNTP (see [RFC977]), and WEBMASTER@domain for HTTP (see [HTTP])."
— RFC 2142, "Mailbox Names for Common Services, Roles and Functions," Dave Crocker, Internet Mail Consortium. (May 1997)
This RFC—alongside <POSTMASTER@domain> (required by RFC 822)—is what cemented "webmaster" as the canonical, protocol-level point-of-contact role for a website.
"The word “webmaster” comes from a similar role defined in the original specification for email called the postmaster, which in turn comes from the similarly named government position Postmaster General. You can think of the postmaster as an email administrator. The idea being that you can email postmater[sic] @ some domain, and always be connected directly to somebody that could fix a problem with the email. That remains a reserved name today on any email inbox. The webmaster served a pretty similar purpose on the web."
— Jay Hoffman, "What Happened to the Webmaster" (June 16, 2020)
And thus, webmaster@domain was already the de facto email inbox address tied to the HTTP protocol itself.
The label and title quickly grew into something far more than that, though.
"At first it referred to that frustrated techie who set up the rogue Web server without company authorization, coded HTML by hand in a text editor, FTP'd the files to the server, and in his spare time answered all the incoming corporate e-mails, usually also without company authorization."
— Brian Wold, "What Happened to the Webmaster? (And other misleading titles)" (May 12, 2006)
The era that conjures "webmaster" most strongly began in the mid 90's, as Beverly Hills Internet was launched, now known as GeoCities.
"[T]he point about the web before social networks or before Web 2.0 is not that you had a profile on GeoCities, but that you had a chance to build your cyber home outside of it, you could exist and grow outside of a centralized service."
— Olia Lialina, quoted in Cybercultural by Richard MacManus (March 7, 2025)
A culture developed as people realized anybody could make their own website. 88x31 buttons, blinkies, .GIFs, web rings, visitor counters, guestbooks. All originate from this time.
"In 1996, the web was littered with black-and-yellow-striped animated .gifs reveling in metaphors of road construction... 'This site under construction' was the default home page disclaimer, until everyone realized that the inherent nature of the web was that it would be perpetually under construction."
— Fresher Styles for Web Designers, O'Reilly (December 2008)
While GeoCities is fondly remembered now, it certainly had its problems and issues. Similarly, there were other platforms at the time as well, such as Tripod, Angelfire, and Homestead. It can be easy to revise history into an idealized monoculture.
"It was not a paradise for early web makers. It was not even a good web hosting service. It was free and not worse than others, that's why webmasters endured the pain of clumsy page builders, interventions from commercial scripts being injected into their pages, accidental file deletions, etc…"
— "GeoCities' Afterlife and Web History," by Olia Lialin, One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age (July 30, 2019)
Over 38 million pages were deleted when Yahoo shut down the platform in 2009.
As sites grew and the Internet evolved from the expectation of a handful of HTML files located in /var/www/html/ into instead a complex beast of software and content management systems, the "one person does everything" model stopped being the default, and the title became a culture-war topic among web professionals.
Schisms grew from the complexity. The Internet became a vector for business, and then the way to make money as the dotcom bubble inflated. People needed to specialize, whether that was to design for the front-end, or program and administrate the server from the back-end. You needed usability specialists and network engineers and search engine optimizers.
Dammit Jim, I’m a Webmaster, not a Digital Government Web Content Communications and Application Development Knowledge Management Specialist! ...or am I?
Is the term webmaster an accurate description of the responsibilities of today’s web professional, or is that moniker just a quaint artifact from the simpler, earliest days of the web where someone akin to a similarly quaint notion of a Ringmaster juggled a circus of unwieldy text, spinning logos and blinking text?
— David Kitzmiller, FCC Webmaster, Mastering the Web: An Old-Fashioned Notion? (August 12, 2010)
Perhaps the clearest and most citable marker of the term's formal retirement from mainstream professional use is when Google rebranded "Google Webmasters" to "Google Search Central" in 2020. An institutional funeral.
"Merriam-Webster claims the first known use of the word 'webmaster' was in 1993, years before Google even existed. However, the term is becoming archaic, and according to the data found in books, its use is in sharp decline. A user experience study we ran revealed that very few web professionals identify themselves as webmasters anymore. They're more likely to call themselves Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), online marketer, blogger, web developer, or site owner, but very few 'webmasters.' In brainstorming our new name, we realized that there's not one term that perfectly summarizes the work people do on websites."
— Google Search Central Blog (Nov 12, 2020)
It is your innate human right to create.
All of the above was pretext for this: You can be a webmaster right now. You can create a website right now. Yes, you. Your website can look however you want it to, and function in any way you want. It can have whatever you want on it.
You can look up tutorials, and you can have your questions answered by humans just by joining forums, IRC channels, and independent platforms. The act of creating and learning inherently places you in the community.
Generally speaking, we have been deceived into thinking many broad falsehoods:
Regarding the webmaster:
Regarding the Internet:
Regarding us:
When plainly laid out like this, it's easy to see how we've been conned into a cynical, pessimistic—even misanthropic view of things. Companies worth billions of dollars have a bottom line that depends on the general population to continue believing all of the above.
Our perspective on technology and other people has been greatly distorted into the negative. In reality, the Internet has terabytes of high-quality resources to learn from. There are thousands of people just like you looking for connection, hungry for a better vision of the future, wanting to cultivate nourishing hobbies. You are so capable.
The idea that one person cannot master all aspects of the web, as the webmaster was once known to, is demonstrably false.
Be optimistic about your capabilities and the willingness of others to help you. Be skeptical of anybody who attempts to divide or gatekeep, proclaiming the mandated use or superiority of a specific tool or platform.
Likewise, I want to note that searching for "return of the webmaster" in 2026 may lead you to discussions of the "agentic web" or "orchestration," a euphemism for somebody who employs generative AI to do the multidisciplinary work that comes with being a webmaster. Those who manage a stack of expensive large language models, those who are prompt engineers for static site generators, and those who neglect to take the time to learn for themselves, unwilling to put in the effort themselves (or thinking they're incapable to).
That's not what this is. My manifesto is not about becoming an orchestrator. Being a webmaster means becoming a sovereign creator. We are not reclaiming the title of "webmaster" only to then offload the work and art onto chatbots. We are reclaiming it because it is the only title that remains which still carries the weight of total, unapologetic human agency over our digital lives.
To be a Webmaster, you need a computer, a text editor, and a way to host. That's it.
You don't need a degree in computer science. You don't need a $50/month subscription to a proprietary builder. You don't even need the money to buy a domain name if you don't have the cash.
If you don't have a computer or Internet yourself, you could be sitting in a public library on a recycled Chromium machine and still you have everything you need to become a Webmaster. There are not gatekeepers at the doors of the World Wide Web. Like many other things in life, the only lock is the one we put on our own ambitions.
A Webmaster is not just a developer. You are a UX/UI designer, you are a writer and editor, you are an accessibility specialist, and an advocate for others to reclaim their digital autonomy. You are a creator, rather than a consumer. And you are capable of all these things.
You will wrestle with semantic markup to make a page accessible. You will agonize over typeface kerning and colour palettes. You will write prose and publish your weird obsessions and link to your Internet neighbours. You will manage server logs, tweak the .htaccess file, and you will decide and design the architecture of your digital home.
This is not a career path, this is a craft. This is the last best multidisciplinary sandbox, both creative and technical, all rendered on an index.html.
And there is no wrong answer. Serve your website over the Gemini protocol. SSH into the Tildeverse and build a terminal-based homepage alongside strangers. Set up a homelab in your closet using the old, defunct family computer. There are a million ways to do this. The only wrong answer is sitting on the sidelines believing you don't belong in the arena with us.
Corporate social media platforms we used to call the "new public square" have been astroturf'd, bulldozed, and sold to the highest-bidding fascist oligarch. Your existence is a rental, your voice is a throttled lottery. Your so-called "community" is at the mercy of a billionaire's whim.
Building your own website is an act of digital repatriation.
Creating your own corner of the Internet reclaims one of the only mediums where we retain freedom, creativity, and autonomy.
With the plethora of hosting options available, you can migrate if terms of service change to your disliking. There's no pay-to-play visibility. There's just you, text, and the open protocols of the web.
The most effective way the power structures of our age have oppressed us is by making us feel as though we are stupid, as though we are incapable of learning.
Many of us have been convinced coding is arcane magic, that servers are eldritch horrors, and that computer science is reserved for child prodigies and those who are privileged to just "naturally get it."
A user who is afraid of the machine and doubts their own capabilities is one that will surrender and pay for a solution.
You are not incapable. There is a lot to learn, yes. And the technologies are deep. But do not forget we are still living in the golden age of human knowledge—endless free resources, tutorials, wikis, and forums are available at your fingertips.
I will repeat myself and say the only barrier that exists is the one you construct in your mind.
You require grit, determination, and a "why." This is your why. The desire to express yourself. The hunger to build something truly of your own. The need to connect with other humans.
Let me be clear: this is not about "IndieWeb" specs, it isn't about the "Small Web" or "SmolWeb." It isn't a retro-revival nostalgia trip, pining for GeoCities and AOL dial-up tones.
Those are all labels, clubs, and memberships. Standards with elitism and in-group and cliques and gatekeeping as a result.
What I'm talking about is universal. It's not about specific mechanics, it's about a philosophy. It is a big tent.
It doesn't matter if you speak English. It doesn't matter if you don't know how to spell words right in your native tongue. It doesn't matter if you don't know a single line of JavaScript, either.
And it certainly doesn't matter if you think you have "nothing interesting to say." I promise you do. All humans have value, we have our hobbies, our frustrations, our obsessions and small thoughts. Putting this in writing on a page you build with your own hands means you're contributing to a richer, stranger, more wonderful ecosystem.
I stand on the shoulders of giants. I am not the first to write a web manifesto, nor the last. I myself am nobody special, nor anybody with authority. I am mere conduit for a message that desperately needs to be heard.
I give credit to Tantek Çelik, Amber Case, Aaron Parecki, Crystal Beasley, and Kevin Marks for founding IndieWebCamp in Portland, Oregon in 2011.
I give credit to Daniel Murray's melonking.net as a foundational "web revival" artifact.
"[The web revival] is a riff on the 20th century American folk music revival, and it implies that early personal sites, like those hosted on GeoCities, were culturally significant as digital folk art."
— Daniel Murray (Melonking), quoted in New_ Public (September 7, 2025)
I give credit to webmistress Sadness, who has been sharing resources on web mastery for years, and was the founder of the now defunct Yesterweb, served as many people's first experience of the indie-web-crafting scene.
"In the earlier iterations of this manifesto, I made the mistake of focusing too heavily on the creation of personal websites as the main method of fighting against the exploitative capitalist hellscape that has become our Internet... For example, we can work on transforming social relations online."
— Sadness, Internet manifesto (May 2023)
I give credit to James G., who has been blogging about the independent Internet for over six years, who hosts the podcast Wonders of Webweaving, and who has recently founded the Web Writers' Collective, which is open to anyone.
I give credit to Alexandra and Kaylee for the community and resources of 32-bit Café. I give credit to Adam Newbold for the community and services of omg.lol.
There are hundreds of people who have dedicated thousands of hours in trying to make the web more human and joyous for all.
We can create a more human web right now. The world is in dire straits, and I'm reminded of the words of Carl Sagan, coincidentally written at the dawn of the webmaster:
“In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot (1994)
There are those who see the act of webmastery as "only" a hobby and pastime—and I say this is not mutually exclusive to world-saving. The personal is political. Our ability to maintain our joy and ourselves is, itself, resistance.
Here is another falsehood I want to emphasize: Our right to freely express ourselves is never a guarantee. The past thirty years of the Internet have been an explosive, chaotic experiment in the commons and the human condition. But the freedom of expression we've been granted is not a given or perpetual promise, and it is extremely foolish to think we will have this for the next ten years, let alone forever.
Start as you are, with what you have, while you still have time to do so.
Exercise your innate human right to create.
Be a developer. Be a designer. Be a writer. Be a systems administrator. Be a philosopher. Be a Webmaster.
It is the most punk rock, anti-establishment, liberating thing you can do in the 21st century. And yeah, it is fucking awesome.
Now, go build something.
Over the past year I've written forty-two essays on this subject. Here are the ones I think are most worth a beginner's time.
