The Tended Web Manifesto

The Tended Web is a compact pledge for people who still want the independent web to reward care.

It does not ask whether a machine was involved. It asks whether a human stayed in command: choosing the work, shaping the result, checking the claims, and standing behind what remains.

The mechanism is deliberately small. A participant publishes a plain-text pledge file. People vouch for specific works they have actually examined. Indexes crawl those files and publish a directory. No platform account, no global score, no canonical gatekeeper.

Works are judged blind to method. Relationships are public by name.

Disclosure belongs in prose, where context can survive. It should never become a metadata field for filtering people by production method.

This is the working draft home for The Tended Web. The full manifesto text can grow here as the node-zero implementation proves the file formats.