Friendship through blogging & Searching the indieweb

Philipp Temmel -

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 353 👋

Well, a new post has landed on Creativerly. And I am super happy to finally publish this one. As the corporate web gets plastered with AI-slop, SEO-optimzed post, click-bait titles, and more every single day, the indieweb has been thriving. However, as major search engines do not make their millions and billions of revenue by surfacing real content, real writing, real projects, and instead highlight ads and AI-slop on their front-pages, there is the need for alternative search engines to browse through the indieweb.

My newest blog post gives a quick overview of exactly those alternative search engines and ways to discover what the sites that made the web authentic. Those tools emphasize personal websites, blogs, independent projects, and real human writing.

It needs all of us and our creative projects to preserve the original spirit of the internet. And by discovering what all those creative minds out there are creating, can spark the last bit of motivation and energy to publish your own new project and website too. Major search engines as well as tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity are a major threat to the web since when using those, people consume corporate-controlled summaries which are bypassing the actual websites.

If you want to discover personal websites, blogs, creative projects, and human writing instead of AI-slop and ads, Creativerly's newest post is for you.

Enjoy reading it.

Searching the indieweb: How to find real people, real projects, real writing in a sea of AI slop

Google and other major search engines get flooded with AI-generated, SEO-optimized, and low quality content every single day. AI-slop became the front-page of the internet. And burdened underneath are the things created by real people, real projects, and real writing. The internet lost its authenticity, and instead it is dominated by algorithms and corporations. Opinions are created as clickbait, headlines are just there to make us navigate to a specific website, most posts are tediously put together for views, dominating SEO. Suddenly, the whole media landscape has collectively agreed to whatever they put out, has been created to earn clicks, instead of drawing the attention of people to it, who want to actual read it.

The corporate web is doomed.

What thrives though is the indieweb, a people-focused alternative to the corporate web, emphasizing personal websites, blogs, independent projects, and real human writing. The indieweb matters as it preserves the original spirit of the internet, being human, and creative. The issue is though, the content which matters most gets buried in an ever-growing pool of AI slop. Traditional search engines like Google put AI-generated summaries and content, and ads first, authentic content gets pushed further down, hardly ever seen by potential visitors. Even worse, people increasingly use ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity to "search" the web. As a result of that, people are consuming corporate-controlled summaries, bypassing the actual websites, the actual content created by real and creative humans, who sometimes rely on people actually visiting their websites to make a living. And the rise of AI browsers make this whole situation even worse.

Yet, I have hope that the indieweb will fight back. It just needs accessible tools to surface content from real people, and not just big platforms. Thankfully, there are already a bunch of alternative search engines, especially built to search through the indieweb, and surface personal websites, blogs, projects, and human writing. No AI-slop, no surveillance, no ads.

Let us get into it.

Read the whole post here:

Searching the indieweb: How to find real people, real projects, real writing in a sea of AI slop
The corporate web is doomed, but the indieweb is thriving. Discover alternative search engines to surface real people, real projects, and real writing.
CreativerlyPhilipp Temmel
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Fresh Updates & News

Capacities adds new AI providers, and a Kindle integration →

With its newest updates, Capacities introduced the possibility to plug in your own API keys from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, or xAI, while previously only OpenAI has been available as a provider. Besides that, this update also included the new Kindle integration, which means users can now bring their Kindle highlights directly into Capacities via its email integration by emailing the highlight exports to save@capacities.io. Head over to the linked post to read the full release notes.

Flyleaf 2.5 adds widgets, and better ways to fix content issues →

The 2.5 version of Flyleaf is here, bringing supports for widgets in all possible size and variants. If this is the first time you hear about Flyleaf, heading over to the deep dive I wrote about it, is a great start to get an overview of the app, that lets you read articles like a book.

The newly introduced widgets display your recently read articles, and optionally your total unread article count. Besides that, this update also adds the "Download via browser" action, which means that if Flyleaf can not acces an article by itself, it will open the respective web page in an in-app browser instead, which allows you to add the currently loaded page contents to Flyleaf with a single tap.

To check out a more in-depth guide on all the changes that got shipped in Flyleaf 2.5, make sure to head over to the linked blog post.

Mental Wealth

❯ AI will happily design the wrong thing for you – “I need to clear something up about my book, “Products People Actually Want.” When I write about how “anyone can build anything” now, some people assume I’m anti-AI. That I think these tools are ruining design or product development. That’s not it at all.”

❯ Friendship through blogging – “The thing about having a boring life is, you don't really have much to say about it. Seriously. Every time someone asks me "what's new?" in real life, my answer is almost always "not much". I could tell them about the lovely things I thrifted recently, or the new houseplants I just bought, or the bread or cake or cookies I baked last Friday, or what an amazing country Iceland is, but the people that I know in real life (except for the husband, who is my biggest and only fan) aren't interested in any of those. Trust me, I tried telling them all those things. All I got in return was a blank stare.”

❯ Exposure – “Designers spend too much time with other designers. I say this as a designer myself. It’s not that hanging out with designers is bad. They’re cool people. But every hour spent talking shop with fellow designers is an hour not spent building relationships that could genuinely improve the quality of your work.”

❯ Desire to Pop – “Abstractions are powerful tools. Given enough abstraction everything gets somewhat simple. Somewhat clear. Also somewhat wrong. Abstraction turns everything real, material, consequential into mostly nothing. The abstraction of “a relationship” hides all the love and care and desire it might entail. The abstraction of “the border” hides the violence its defense entails.”

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Appendix

❯ ICYMI

Over on my personal blog, I just published a new post introducing my first, super-niche macOS app called ShareBridgely, which gives you access to the full native share sheet with all its share extension within your Chromium-based browser. Read the post to learn more about the background story, and join the TestFlight if you want to give ShareBridgely a try.

❯ Quick Bits

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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