Notices by Richard MacManus (ricmac@mastodon.social)

“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

LOL, this would be peak Web 2.0 apocalypse if it happens. https://indieweb.social/@jbz/114717058520886865

2/2 I must admit, as a small indie publisher (with Cybercultural), I'm torn on this. I use Cloudflare, but if I turn on the AI blocker — which I haven't yet — then doesn't that make my already minimal distribution even worse? How do I build up my publisher brand if I don't show up in the AI overviews? You might think this is besides the point (AI bad!!), but unless you're a relatively big online publisher that gets Google Discover traffic, there are very few other ways to have your content seen.

1/2 "People aren't following the footnotes." That's a good line from Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, referencing the ever-dwindling referral traffic from Google, OpenAI and Perplexity due to AI answers (https://www.axios.com/2025/06/19/ai-search-traffic-publishers). He was promoting Cloudflare's ability to block AI crawlers to help publishers "extract concessions" (as Rebooting puts it: https://www.therebooting.com/ai-optimism-in-the-riviera/)

@tchambers @mastodonmigration @laurenshof @cheeaun @rolle @scottjenson @zeldman Great stuff, Tim! I know progress is being made eg on search, but I like when the community’s leaders (like yourself) give these issues some air and tough love.

Looks like Threads has been hacked…

This is a great point, and something I do think about at the same time as I find many great uses for AI tools: “…journalism’s first role is to report honestly, rigorously and relentlessly on the emergence of the AI companies and what they actually mean for society. We *completely* fumbled this with social media, 18 years ago.”

I actually didn’t find social media to be that useful in 2007, as I always preferred blogging. But society thought otherwise, and here we are now. https://masto.onemanandhisblog.com/@adders/114676718671595788

Love this early-Web 2.0 energy… https://indieweb.social/@classicweb/114686766840080046

Happy 30th birthday to #PHP. I wrote a history of it several years ago: “If CGI scripts were the start of interactive programming on the web, then PHP was the natural next step — at least on the server-side. Just a month after Brendan Eich created the JavaScript scripting language at Netscape, an independent developer from Canada named Rasmus Lerdorf released the first version of a toolset he called Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools).” https://cybercultural.com/p/1995-php-quietly-launches-as-a-cgi-scripts-toolset/

Here's my writeup of #FediForum, in which I ask the question: is the fediverse making meaningful progress vs. centralized platforms? The post includes @_elena's excellent video and has discussion of @cwebber's presentation, Bounce (by @quillmatiq & @snarfed.org), Surf (by @mike & @marci), Channels.org (by @michael & @newsmast team), & Bandwagon (by @benpate). Thx also @j12t & @anca for FediForum. The headline is via Christine: "we can’t succeed without joy." https://thenewstack.io/bringing-joy-back-to-the-web-fediverse-vs-centralized-apps/

I’m sure we will hear a lot about Bill Atkinson (RIP) over the next few days, but I want to point out the huge influence of #HyperCard on the Web. @timbl himself mentioned it in his original WWW proposal (https://cybercultural.com/p/1990-programming-the-world-wide-web/), early web browsers like ViolaWWW were modeled on HyperCard (https://cybercultural.com/p/1992-web-vs-gopher/), and even JavaScript owed a debt to it (HyperCard included an object oriented scripting language called HyperTalk; https://cybercultural.com/p/1995-the-birth-of-javascript/).

Blue tits (including fledglings) enjoying some brunch at our bird feeder. #BirdsOfMastodon #ukbirds

@buttondown cc @jackyan

@cwebber the joy message was spot on! It seems so simple, and yet it's so rare to find joy on any social media these days (and yes, that includes the fediverse). You're so right that it's how Twitter became popular back in Web 2.0, so *that* part of Twitter we need back. Looking forward to checking out Spritely and thanks again for the presentation at FediForum.