Notices by Richard MacManus (ricmac@mastodon.social)

I can’t get over how different Google is from the 1999 company that offered web users a qualitatively better search engine than what they’d been used to with portals. I know Sergey Brin is into AI now, but I wonder what Larry Page makes of 2025-Google search, and how bad for users and publishers alike it is. https://cybercultural.com/p/google-1999/ https://mastodon.social/@404mediaco/114904206348867968

@Gargron

Out of sheer boredom on a Saturday post-dinner, I opened up Threads (I no longer post there) and saw this cry for help. Poor bastards… #MetaWorld #AOLvibes

One of the ways to get Mastodon more visibility across the normieverse is to add your link to @Techmeme. e.g. I requested that one of my Mastodon posts about the OpenAI browser news be added (I thought it added good context) and within a minute or two it was up there. It's a small way to promote the fediverse, but it helps when people see more Mastodon (or indeed indie blog) links on Techmeme. Note: the button, on the bottom-right, only displays on the desktop version of Techmeme (not mobile).

What’s the social protocol for when you want to tweak your #introduction post on Mastodon? Just minor updates, so I don’t think it deserves a new post. Maybe just putting “Updated, 10 July 2025” in it?

Oh no…now Meta is automatically sharing our private messages to its AI. As far as I can tell, you can only turn it off for each message thread, one at a time (and there seems to be no option to turn it off *at all* for group threads!). Yet another privacy disaster from Facebook.

I use Messenger btw for family and non-tech friends, so don’t (ahem) shoot the messenger.

As search engines in 2025 shift from providing links to (AI) answers — and all the angst that is causing web publishers — I thought I'd take a look at what search engines were like in 1998...one year before Google became popular. At that time search was seen as just one part of the portal experience. But little did AltaVista know, it wouldn't be the center of attention on @dannysullivan's Search Engine Watch for much longer. https://cybercultural.com/p/search-1998/ #InternetHistory #searchengines

@Gargron option to turn on HTTP referrer; great for us web publishers! 🙏 🙏 🙏

Don’t fall for this again, hundreds of millions of people. https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-daily-app-users-new-data-shows/

This is why we loved David Lynch: such PASSION for his chosen medium. Be sure to watch this video all the way through. https://youtu.be/OQiQk8AJ0YI

via https://www.indiewire.com/features/craft/twin-peaks-season-3-theatrical-mix-david-lynch-intended-1235136544/

@evan Personally I view it the other way round: a DM is confidential unless you both agree otherwise. It’s like email sent from a friend or acquaintance: I wouldn’t share a personal email to me unless I got the other person’s ok. That’s just how I see it (fwiw I voted ‘never’, but probably ‘rarely’ would’ve been better).

Another one bites the dust… #XThreads

“Mr. Prince said he was “deeply concerned that the incentives for content creation are dead.””

This definitely resonates with me. Sometimes I wonder why I bother spending so much of my time writing articles that fewer and fewer people read. Yes, AI is to blame, altho I also put a lot of blame on ‘traffic-throttling’ social media like X, LinkedIn, Facebook/Threads. The open web is, sadly, almost devoid of incentives for creators. This is a challenge for fediverse too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/technology/cloudflare-ai-data.html?unlocked_article_code=1.TE8.6JAh.CFClZ2CqkmoO&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

“I think the new web aesthetic is about getting active again. Platforms encourage passivity. They want us to stay still and scrolling, looking at what the algo wants to show us. Like, swipe, repeat. But the new web aesthetic is non-linear. It encourages you to move from one site to another, to dive down rabbit holes, and crucially, to continue sharing what you find.”

toward a new aesthetic, @sachajudd https://newsletter.sachajudd.com/archive/toward-a-new-aesthetic/

Creative Commons has a new set of AI licenses, CC Signals: "This is not about creating new property rights; it is more like defining manners for machines."

Hmmm, some of these machines already ignore robot.txt files, so I'm not sure how well this will work. But CC *did* revolutionize copyright licences in early Web 2.0, so I'd certainly like to see them help out in the AI era.

https://creativecommons.org/ai-and-the-commons/cc-signals/implementation/

Threads is allegedly part of the fediverse, yet I'm nowhere near the point of being able to ask Threads users to follow my Mastodon profile. Attached is how my Mastodon profile looks over there. Some of the issues:

1. Threads users can follow Mastodon Me *only if* they themselves have turned on fediverse sharing (an arbitrary hurdle).
2. They have to exactly type my Mastodon handle.
3. You can like but not reply.
4. "Some posts may not be visible" (why?!)
5. There's no bio!

Any other hurdles?

It took me ages to find screenshots of BowieNet as it looked on launch in September 1998, but I finally found some beauties. Oh, and I explain how BowieNet not only became the default online community for David Bowie fans, it also anticipated the social networks that would emerge in the 2000s, like Facebook and Reddit. https://cybercultural.com/p/bowienet-launch-1998/ #InternetHistory #BowieForever

Headless browsers like Browserbase and Playwright have a huge role to play in AI agent technology. Whether we like it or not, it's increasingly going to be agents that browse our websites moving forward. So Browserbase, I think, is mining a very profitable part of the AI dev stack here. https://thenewstack.io/why-headless-browsers-are-a-key-technology-for-ai-agents/

The web is not thriving for indie publishers. We can only hope Google doesn’t lose sight of small indie websites, and how *they* can earn a living in the AI era. That was the beauty of the Web 2.0 era — there were opportunities for *everyone* to thrive. I see Google, AI companies and big publishers like Reddit thriving in this era…but surely Google knows that isn’t enough for the broader web ecosystem to thrive.

Ref: Google’s “from our point of view the web is thriving." https://c.im/@rustybrick/114732529149457285

I actually like that cultural folks (musicians, magazines, writers, music bloggers, artists, etc) are starting to show up on Bluesky now. I remember checking last year if Electronic Sound magazine was on open social, but at the time they were just on X. So this is progress. I don’t expect them to ever be on Mastodon, but that’s ok…different open social media platforms can have different vibes; indeed I think that’s better. I kind of go to Bluesky for the culture stuff. https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ev4fhapxcvyjk2ldlwvcfzoq/post/3ls4qmfa3zc2i