Richard MacManus
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ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Richard MacManus
@ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
240 followers 2 following 1.2K posts
Tech journalist covering developers & the modern Web @ The New Stack · Internet historian @ https://cybercultural.com · Founded ReadWriteWeb (2003–2012) · 🥝 in 🇬🇧

🌉 bridged from ⁂ https://mastodon.social/@ricmac, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact
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ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Your moment of Saturday zen: a red-breasted robin drops by during a rare break from blue tits and sparrows mobbing the bird feeder (let’s not talk about when the starlings come in, brawling and bullying).

Full disclosure: this photo, snapped through the […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
Red-breasted robin during a moment of peace at the bird feeder.
November 22, 2025 at 11:22 AM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
The Wayback Machine has been offline for the past hour or so :( Every morning before I work I am either writing Cybercultural posts or researching them, so Wayback is a daily visit for me. Hope they aren't having tech issues. No word yet on their socials (cc @internetarchive)
Wayback Machine "temporarily offline" message
November 20, 2025 at 7:49 AM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
One of the more obnoxious trends in recent years is how VC firms have tried to brand themselves as “media” — a trend that Musk’s X amplified. I’m old enough to remember when bloggers became “new media” in the 2000s; & sure, some of us did indeed turn into […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
Text from LinkedIn post about A16Z New Media: “Every company needs to be a media company first nowadays. Here's my hot take: We're moving toward VCs funding media startups that then expand into products, rather than starting with products and trying to build content + communities around them. Think about it, creators have been doing this forever. Build the audience first, then figure out what to sell them based on what the audience asks for. The future of venture capital might be: 1. Investing in a large number of early stage media companies. 2. Seeing which ones can gain traction & grow communities quickly. 3. Let that community dictate what products or services emerge. 4. Double down on winners, cut the losers. This news isn't just al6z evolving their offering. They're showing us the future of how businesses get built. #venturecapital #startups #distribution AlEL NEW MEDIA 393 70 comments • 32 reposts”
November 14, 2025 at 9:34 AM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
So, any update on Threads allowing its users to follow Mastodon users? It’s nearly a year after it announced partial support for that, but in my tests just now it doesn’t appear that even partial support works now. Have they just sweeped this entirely under […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
Threads pretending to be part of the fediverse in December 2024
November 4, 2025 at 7:16 PM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
I know people will be piling on about Grokipedia, but hilariously its definition of Web 2.0 seems to be much better than Wikipedia's. On Grokipedia's page, there's a great description of misinformation on platforms like X and Facebook. Wikipedia does not […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
highlighted: "This propagation is amplified by engagement-maximizing algorithms on platforms like Facebook and Twitter (now X), which surface content correlating with past user behavior, thereby favoring sensational falsehoods that elicit reactions over mundane facts. For instance, a 2024 observational study of Twitter's For You feed revealed disproportionate amplification of low-credibility accounts, with algorithms boosting their visibility by up to 2.5 times compared to chronological timelines, enabling sustained reach for debunked narratives."
October 28, 2025 at 11:15 AM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
They say AI hallucinates and gets things wrong. But what about humans!? Twice today I've seen the NANDA report referenced — in a Wired profile of AI critic/AI publicist Ed Zitron, and in a Gary Marcus op-ed on NYT. As I noted in my recent profile of NANDA […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
Gary Marcus op-ed in NYT Wired profile of Zitron
October 27, 2025 at 5:21 PM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Regarding @anildash's excellent post about OpenAI's Atlas browser (https://www.anildash.com/2025/10/22/atlas-anti-web-browser/). I tested how visible my history website Cybercultural is in Atlas vs Chrome with the search query: "what happened on the internet […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
My query result in Chrome; my site is above the fold (just) in my MacBook. My query result in Atlas; my site does get mentioned, although the ChatGPT results overshadow it.
October 24, 2025 at 11:08 AM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
I'm currently writing the next in my Cybercultural series of posts about early blogging, now focusing on 2001 (here's 2000: https://cybercultural.com/p/blogs-rss-2000/). I came across #!/usr/bin/girl by @zannah, who had multiple websites back then. Such great […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
meta-zannah website, March 2001
October 24, 2025 at 6:56 AM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
First test of Atlas — its summary of my latest article is almost as long as the article 😂
OpenAI Atlas displaying my latest Cybercultural article and "summarizing" it
October 21, 2025 at 8:18 PM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Also, I tried my hand at a WTN-related meme.
Murderbot: "These humans still don't know what the fediverse is..."
October 10, 2025 at 2:19 PM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
@timbl near the end of his wonderful memoir: “The evolution of the Fediverse is hard to predict - there are parts of it that we can't imagine […] The system will emerge organically, and I can't predict what other wonderful things will be built on top of it […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
The evolution of the Fediverse is hard to predict - there are parts of it that we can't imagine, just as, in the days of the early web, I could never have imagined something like Google search - or Github, or a webcomic like KCD. The system will emerge organ-ically, and I can't predict what other wonderful things will be built on top of it. With Solid, with Al, with Bluesky, Matrix and Mastodon, with RSS and a podcasting revival, I see these little shoots breaking forth from the soil - the first signs of spring. I think users are ready for something else.
September 22, 2025 at 10:06 PM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
5/ Douglas Rushkoff made a great point in this podcast episode: that social media nowadays, and internet culture in general, mirrors the zeros and ones nature of binary computing. Everything is either True or False in 2025, and there is nothing in-between […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
Hidden Forces podcast episode with Doug Rushkoff
September 22, 2025 at 6:27 PM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
For my 'one more thing' on WTN this week ( @feed ) I highlighted some lovely web community action from 2000. The image attached is from Anita Rowland's weblog that year, describing a meetup with fellow Seattle bloggers (2 legendary bloggers, @jessamyn and […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
Anita Rowland's weblog in February 2000, describing a meetup with fellow Seattle bloggers
September 19, 2025 at 6:15 PM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
TBL on the founding of WHATWG, which now controls the HTML standard (clearly he was not a fan, at least initially).
From TBL memoir, pg 196: continued developing their flavour of HT ML beyond W3C's control. There was a real toxicity to the WHATWG mailing list; they were a bunch of typically white male geeks who had hoisted the pirate's black flag, and they were not very polite about disagreement. WHATWG's approach allowed web developers to make all kinds of errors, and never complained to anyone reading the page by raising alert boxes or banners. Now, because the errors in the web page are hidden from the user, they are also hidden from the developer, who can never see what needs to be done to clear up the messy bits. Under this approach, the web would become bloated and slow, full of errors which the browser was programmed to ignore. Hixie soon left W3C completely, and not long after, someone found a series of blog posts he had previously written advocating for what he called 'humanitarian eugenics'. Hixie's callow manifesto called for selective reproduction based on measures of intelligence, where mothers cannot bear offspring without a licence. As you can
September 14, 2025 at 3:13 PM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
OMG, I just discovered I got a mention in Tim Berners-Lee’s memoir!! Totally unexpected. Ok, he spelled my name wrong, but that doesn’t matter :) The read-write web lives on!
Despite the lull in development of the semantic web of the 1990s, by the late 2000s, I was beginning to see a way forward. I have always believed the web should be a two-way thing: a place to write, as well as to read. Richard McManus, a journalist and blogger, captured this spirit in a blog he named the 'read-write web'. It was also a big value with the W3C team: my original WorldWide Web.app on the NeXT had been an editor, not simply a browser: an application, like a word processor, which allows you to create and modify material as well as just read it. At INRIA, the French national computer science lab, Vincent Quint and Irene Greif had built a hypertext browser-editor, where you could even edit diagrams. The W3C website was set up so that you could submit your own web page. And of course, Wikipedia is a great realization of this idea. So for documents, we can set up a read-write web.
September 10, 2025 at 9:39 PM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Well I got an invite to the new Digg, so am checking it out now. I don't even use Reddit much, so I can't see myself using new Digg. The one social news site I do check regularly is Hacker News. But if you scan new Digg's homepage, it's clear the community […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
New Digg homepage
September 10, 2025 at 4:47 PM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Ah ha, so if Signal ever goes evil, then we have a solution: "...we also have a two-pack bundle. The idea being, you can exchange encrypted messages with a friend, relatively safely."
https://discuss.systems/@ricci/115180528280090105
two computers with Enigma Touches communicating with each other
September 10, 2025 at 2:59 PM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Arrived today, looking forward to reading! @timbl
Tim Berners-Lee’s memoir, hardcover book UK
September 10, 2025 at 1:03 PM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Meanwhile, in my local secondhand store… #appleevent2025
£20 iMac
September 9, 2025 at 7:22 PM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
I think this is a fair statement, right? #threads #fakefediverse
Eli Mallon @iame.li • 55m Wait wait wait wait wait, new take on this site. Why TF is Threads not listed as an ActivityPub node? • Kye Fox @kyefox.com • 2h Goodhart's law: when the measure becomes the target, it ceases to become a good measure. Centralization is the measure here. arewedecentralizedyet.online ATProto is still new. ActivityPub was more centralized by this metric when it was this old. Are We Decentralized Yet? A site with statistics regarding the decentralization status of various web services © arewedecentralizedyet.online 2 1 3 ① Richard MacManus @ricmac.cybercu... • 2m Because nobody in the fediverse takes Threads seriously. 企 • •
September 5, 2025 at 6:20 PM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
If you search for “fediverse” on Threads, it’s mostly confused users wondering why they are sharing to the fediverse (pressed a strange button?). But there are also people *blaming Mastodon* for Meta’s failure to implement full fediverse.
“I think we've talked about this before... fediverse sharing won't ever be finished because most instances refuse to federate with threads and then most fediverse people personal block threads meaning it will never work as it should!”
September 4, 2025 at 5:51 PM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
If you get an email titled "We updated our Terms of Service" in 2025, you can guarantee it's about using your data for AI purposes. Here's a new T&C from a company I use (I won't name them, as I don't have a problem with this co). "Services" in this case means AI services.
Text: "(v) you authorize [co name] to store and use Input and Output for the purposes of providing you with the Services, to develop and improve the Services, including as part of the design, training and development process for machine learning models."
September 3, 2025 at 2:14 PM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
So apparently "Blueskyism" is a word, and it has heavy political connotations according to this post by Tim Onion. Ultimately I blame X/Twitter for politicising what social media app you use, but I don't like the idea of being painted as a certain type of […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
Tim Onion‬ ‪@bencollins.bsky.social‬ "Blueskyism" helped make The Onion one of the largest newspapers in the world in less than a year. If we had spent all of our time on Twitter, we'd be poorer, dumber and terminally ill with internet poisoning. He's [Nate Silver] just angry he's wasting away over there in a nazi agnostic lane that doesn't exist.
September 2, 2025 at 11:41 AM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Colossus, the first large-scale electronic digital computer, which was working in Bletchley Park in January 1944.

“The prototype Colossus was brought to Bletchley Park in lorries and reassembled by Flowers' engineers. It had approximately 1600 electronic […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
Book: COLOSSUS The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers B. JACK COPELAND AND OTHERS
August 31, 2025 at 8:36 PM
ricmac.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Google AI Overviews trying to cover its tracks by blaming “some AI models” :) https://hachyderm.io/@lizardbill/115123179799897154
Googling “is 1995 30 years ago”
August 31, 2025 at 7:34 PM