The second group, however, is a little more difficult to pin down: They're the people who claim a patch of land, perhaps even just in their backyard, and declare themselves to be rulers—if not in the real world, then, at least, on the internet.

It's often not clear whether the made-up countries—or, as they're known by insiders, "micronations"—founded by the second kind of self-styled monarchs are "real" and physical, or just a website with some phony land claims. Either way, they tend to get a ton of press, like Liberland, a new libertarian state on the Serbian-Croatian border, did last month. Were people actually living there? Was it all a hoax? Nobody knew for certain, but Liberland had an official-looking website and a massively popular web presence among wannabe secessionists, and that was enough to give it an air of legitimacy.

Liberland's curious circumstance—straddling the line between the hard realities of geopolitics and the ephemeral untruth of the internet—got me thinking: how did the internet change the starting-your-own-country game?