🗞 What's New: Fewer personalized Meta ads in Europe: A new ad crisis?

Here's what you'll find in this issue:

• Meta is rolling out big changes for personalized Facebook and Instagram ads in Europe.
• Advances in AI seem to be slowing down, but here's what (likely) comes next.
• $300K MRR with a user feedback tool. Sarah Hum hit ramen profitability just 7 months after launching.

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In the upcoming weeks, European Facebook and Instagram users will face a big decision. They can either:

• Pay for an ad-free experience,

• Stick with the free version that serves up personalized ads, or

• Try a new option with less targeted ads, based only on details like age, location, gender, and app activity from the past two hours.

But this new, less personalized option comes with a catch.

Read the full article →

🍎 Apple now lets you apply to be featured on the App Store.

🧑‍🏫 Three do's and three dont's for startup founders.

👀 Facebook is changing its primary metric to "views."

🎁 YouTube has a new "gift" option for creators who do livestreams.

🔎 Side project ideas that people are actually searching for.

OpenAI's GPT-5 is in trouble.

Claude's new model is 4x more expensive, and it isn't much better.

It seems like all big, multibillion dollar companies are struggling to build more advanced AI.

That's not necessarily a bad thing; here's what comes next.

Read the full article →

Welcome to From Our Desks, where the people behind Indie Hackers share the stories behind the headlines. This week, we talk subscriber content, AI's plateau, Gen Z's top downloads, and more.

Channing Allen, co-founder and editor-in-chief: We finally got around to adding labels — the little green plus signs all over the homepage — to paid IH+ content! This should make it easier for readers to distinguish posts written by the official IH newsroom from posts written by the IH community.

Katie Hignett, journalist: For me, it's the second week in a row covering what seems like endless feature updates, both for LLMs like GPT and Claude, and for tools like Cursor. Maybe companies are trying to sell us on the breadth of applications for their models because they're not sure how much smarter they'll actually become.

Stephen Flanders, journalist: My big story this week was about the indie hackers killing it on TikTok, and it was by far my favorite story that I’ve worked on so far.

Read the full article →

Sarah Hum had the original idea for what would eventually become Canny back in college. The very first version was essentially a community where people could share feedback on apps with one another.

After graduating, Sarah got a job at Meta as a product designer. While there, she met her eventual cofounder (and life partner) Andrew Rasmussen. She also saved up a bunch of money, and eventually quit her job to work on Canny full-time.

Read the full article →

Note to self: If you do it, you're going to overdo it. Knowing this, is it still worth doing?

—@channingallen

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Michal Kankowski, Stephen Flanders, Darko Gjorgjievski, Katie Hignett, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing