What Is The Yesterweb?

The Yesterweb (yesterweb.org) is a community project focused on changing internet culture. Rather than offering a product or service, it publishes a mission statement, a "Manifesto for a New Web," and a set of social etiquette guidelines, and it frames these as shared commitments that participants uphold voluntarily. It is relevant if you want to understand the project's philosophy or apply its community template to your own online space; it is not a platform you sign up for or a tool you install.

What the site actually contains

The page is organized into four sections:

• Mission — states the project's purpose: working with the guidelines established by the manifesto and social etiquette to "progressively transform the culture of the internet and beyond."
• Manifesto for a New Web — three core commitments derived from the staff's practical experience after two years of community organization. The site describes them as a general template applicable to any community at a foundational level, and explicitly says they are "neither rules nor guidelines" but expectations upheld by participants.
• Social Etiquette — guidance on conduct within the community.
• Summary — a condensed overview.

The three commitments, explained

Social responsibility and partisanship

The manifesto treats safety and self-defense as basic necessities of any community, and acknowledges that not all people can be accommodated in the same social space because some beliefs are fundamentally antagonistic. Diversity of opinion is respected up to bounds that reflect oppressive intentions — the site lists discrimination by age, sex, gender, class, nation/race/ethnicity, religion, or disability. When conflict appears, the stated expectation is to understand the situation and take the side of the oppressed. Where it is unclear whether harm was intentional or accidental, the manifesto calls for investigation through dialogue, on the reasoning that ignorance can be resolved with education.

Collective well-being and personal growth

This commitment asks for sustainable selflessness and sacrifice, ideally from everyone, and treats building a new culture as consistent social effort. It emphasizes collective health and compassionate consideration of everyone's personal growth, plus training the ability to listen and empathize — striving for unity and dialogue rather than division and debate, and approaching conflict with the intention of resolution. The excerpt also notes that a community should not create goals purely out of opposition to something.

A note on what the excerpt leaves open

The provided page text cuts off mid-sentence in the second commitment, so the full wording of the third commitment and the Social Etiquette section is not available here. If those details matter to your decision, read them directly on the site rather than relying on summaries.

How to use it

If you are evaluating the project's ideas: read the Manifesto section first, then the Social Etiquette section, since the mission explicitly ties the project's work to both. The Summary is the fastest way to check whether the framing matches what you are looking for.

If you want to apply the template to your own community: the site presents the commitments as a basis of unity that allows "a diversity of focus, interests, and missions" — meaning you adopt the commitments while keeping your own purpose. A practical way to test fit is to take a recent conflict in your community and ask, for each commitment, what the expected response would have been. If the answers feel workable, the template is a reasonable starting point; if they conflict with how your community actually operates, that gap is the thing to resolve before adopting anything.

If you are researching online-community governance: treat the manifesto as a stated set of norms rather than an enforceable policy. The site itself distinguishes expectations from rules, which matters when comparing it with communities that publish formal codes of conduct with enforcement procedures.

Common points of confusion

• It is not a revival of old websites. The name suggests nostalgia, but the published material is about culture and community commitments, not restoring or archiving earlier web platforms.
• The commitments are not moderation rules. They describe expectations participants hold themselves and each other to; the site does not present them as a rulebook with penalties.
• "Partisanship" here is conditional. The manifesto respects opinion diversity only within bounds it defines, and directs the community to take a side when those bounds are crossed — it is not a neutrality stance.

The site's own framing is the best guide to whether it fits your interest: it proposes the commitments "as the basis of unity for those individuals or groups who wish to move in the same direction."