Who’s a Teapot?

This site’s domain, “imateapot”, is an obscure reference to the 418 HTTP code1. It may have started as an April Fool’s joke, with the RFC published April 1, 19982, but to me (and many others3) it’s a quintessential example of how fun and tangible the Internet can be.

This is not a place governed by a few large corporations or any single governing body, it’s built by “us” – the collective we who use and care about it – and we have the ability to make it whatever we want it to be. It may not seem this way all the time, with the Internet’s clicks and traffic4 being further consolidated to just a few big players, but that’s kind of my point! The Internet is a project of the people, and all those who care to have a voice and influence in its direction are able to do so. Say, for example, that you envision a better way to brew coffee. That’s a beautiful thing.

  1. 418 status code definition. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418 ↩

  2. The Coffee protocol RFC. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2324 ↩

  3. Just check out some of the backlash from the time the IETF considered removing the code from the HTTP spec. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=save+http+418&t=ffab&ia=web ↩

  4. 75\% of all clicks to popular news outlets originate from just two sources, Google and Facebook. That’s a ton of control in two hands. https://www.parse.ly/resources/data-studies/referrer-dashboard/ ↩