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My name is Philipp and you are reading Creativerly, the internet corner where I unpack my musings, curate and write about noteworthy apps and software, and explore the latest trends in design and tech.
Hey and welcome to Creativerly 308 👋It is devastating to follow the news currently (to be honest, thinking of how news work, showing us only the bad things going in this world, it has always been devastating, but lately it is again one up). Seeing the sheer demolition the wildfires caused in Los Angeles, Meta shutting down fact-checking and basically open up its gates for harassment, hate speech, and even more violent comments on all of its platforms, deleting trans and nonbinary Messenger themes, one big tech corporation after the other bending their knees in front of Donald Trump by donating to his inauguration fund, the possibility that Austria, my home country, soon gets a far-right extremist Federal Chancellor, among other things, it became really hard to focus on my life and my work, since I started to question everything, loosing sight of what really matters. But at the same time, I feel the urge to vanish in my projects and work to divert, and stay sane. What continuously drives me forward though is hope, knowing that I can get up every single day, show up, and that even the least things I could do can make an impact on our world. One of them is using my reach (although it is relatively small) to raise awareness, condemn decisions made by big tech corporations, and simply inform. I am thankful for folks like Federico Viticci, John Voorhees, and the rest of the MacStories team, as they decided to leave all Meta platforms behind based on the dehumanizing and harmful moderation policies Meta recently introduced. They have immense reach, they have an immense impact, and seeing all the positive reactions I again have hope. There will always be some weird folks like John, an angry, now ex-MacStories reader, who entitled Federico Viticci as "woke AF" after sharing the news about leaving the Meta platforms. I have deleted my Facebook account years ago, I have never signed up for Threads, and while there is in fact a Creativerly Instagram account, I have never posted there, and will simply delete that account too, since I never had any need for it, and now is the right time to say bye.
Fresh Updates & NewsThe latest major release before Sill‘s 1.0 launch is out, and it brings some exciting new updates. First and foremost, Sill now has a separate documentation site and blog for updates, and a full explanation on how to use Sill‘s features. You can find those pages and sites at docs.sill.social. Before the 1.0 launch, the docs site will also house a guide and documentation on how to self-host Sill. Besides that, this update includes the first version of a custom alert system. With that, you can customize notifications to get alerted via email or an RSS feed whenever Sill sees anything that catches a parameter you have defined. Additionally, Sill now features a Trending page, which shows you the ten most popular links on Sill over the past three hours. I am really excited to follow along and experience how Sill develops and evolves. After the recent updates, I am already looking forward to its 1.0 launch. Miro recently informed users of its free plan that starting February 3, 2025, they will collect AI interaction data from Free Plan users to improve Miro AI features like AI summaries, diagrams, and sidekicks. Miro states that the purpose of AI data collection is that the data helps tailoring their AI features to better suit users' needs. They will collect AI input data, which are prompts that users enter, and any content like frames, images, and stickies, that users explicitly select as context, as well as AI output data, which is any AI-generated output like images, text, and sticky notes. Although, Miro applied some measures to safeguard your data like pseudonymization (data gets altered so it cannot be linked back to the user) and de-identification (personally identifiable information like names, gender, birth dates, passwords, IP addresses, credit card details, and company names get remove from the Input Data) and clearly states that Miro does not use AI interaction to train or fine-tune models, users of the Free Plan are yet opted-in by default. Thankfully, you can still disable AI data collection within the Miro AI settings in your account. Once you disable AI data collection, any new data from that point forward is not used to improve AI features. Additionally, any data that was previously collected is no longer used for AI development or improvements. Mastodon announced that it is going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual. Since Mastodon has been founded on the principles that people should be able to control their social circle online, curate their own timeline, and convene freely with any community of their choosing, changing to a new non-profit organization, is an important step to ensure Mastodon‘s legal and operational structures to better reflect and support the pursuit of the initial ideals. After raising a $15M Series A back in October 2024, according to a report by Business Insider, Bluesky is raising another round that would value it around $700 million. Yes, you read that right, another social network that gets fueled by VC money, so it suddenly needs to find ways to pay it back. According to Business Insider, Bluesky told them late November, that it was growing so fast that it needed to add servers to keep up with demand (Bluesky recently crossed 27 million total users). So, it seems like Bluesky needs the additional money to grow its infrastructure and prepare it for even more users, as X and Threads continue to implode. What will be interesting though, is to see how Bluesky will react to the challenge of making money, especially since Bluesky stated back in 2023 that it will never rely on advertising to sustain its business.
Mental Wealth❯ We’re All Trying to Find the Guy Who Did This – “Mark Zuckerberg is sick of the woke politics governing his social feeds. He’s tired of the censorship and social-media referees meddling in free speech. We’re in a “new era” now, he said in a video today, announcing that he plans to replace Facebook and Instagram fact-checkers with a system of community notes similar to the one on X, the rival platform owned by Elon Musk. Meta will also now prioritize “civic content,” a.k.a. political content, not hide from it.” ❯ Where Are You on the Woo Spectrum? – “As a child, I believed in magic. During family holidays in Brittany, I would scan the landscape for korrigans, the local gnome-like spirits. I collected stones and suspected that our neighbor might be a witch. I lost myself in fantasy books, particularly those by Bernard Werber. His novel The Thanatonauts about scientists traveling to the afterlife inspired countless hours of failed astral projection.” ❯ Where did all the design grids go? – ““astonished at how many professional designers do not use grids” reading these 10 words piqued my curiosity. Reading the comments sent my mind down a rabbit trail. I assumed user set grids were something widely adopted and used in the design practice, but apparently they may not be. Why is this? As a discipline many of us designers pride ourselves on pixel-level detail, we nerd out about border radius, type rhythms, and white space. So why the pushback on grid usage?” ❯ Consistency means nothing – “Words create a false sense of agreement. My line of work relies on many words loaded with meaning, but lacking concrete definition. Words like quality, craft and simplicity. These are abstract words. And in the abstract, people generally agree on their meaning. But definitions stray wildly once those abstract concepts get specific and real.”
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Appendix❯ ICYMI I am currently lookin for my next role, my next adventure, my next challenge. I am a Product Designer driven by over a decade of design experience, and I spent more than half of it building and design user-centric products. You can find out more about my work and myself on my personal website. In case you know of any open roles for Product Designer/Sr. Product Designer, remote, preferable EMEA, please let me know. I also appreciate any referrals.
❯ Quick Bits
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