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 369 👋

I keep this section very short today, since there are a bunch of things going on in my head right now, and the following paragraph is a reflection of that.

There is a question floating around the industry right now that nobody seems to want to answer directly: what happens to the identity of a craftsperson when the craft gets abstracted away? Coders have been asking this about themselves for a while now. Designers are starting to ask it too. And I think writers, in their own quiet way, have been asking it the longest. It is less a question about jobs and more a question about meaning — about what it feels like to be skilled at something when skill is no longer the bottleneck.

Last week I caught myself staring at a blank file, cursor blinking, doing that thing where you think you are about to write something but actually just sitting very still. It was not writer's block exactly, more like a strange awareness that the tools around me have shifted so much that I am still figuring out what my role is inside of them. AI has not made me faster at thinking. It has just made me faster at producing. And those are not the same thing. Which got me wondering: if the doing gets automated, what is left for the people who used to pride themselves on the doing?

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Fresh Updates & News

Vivaldi 7.9 introduces UI Auto-hide →

The newest Vivaldi update introduces a feature to make room for content. Once you enable this new feature called UI Auto-hide, your interface, i.e. the tab bar, address bar, panel and status bar, step aside while you are reading, watching, or working. Suddenly, the web is filling your entire window, edge to edge. As soon as you are moving your cursor to any edge of the screen, your tabs, tools, panels immediately appear again.

Besides that, this new update introduces Open Link as Tiled Follower Tab, which opens the page in a tiled view alongside what you are already reading, side-by-side. Any further links you click in your original tab will keep loading in the follower tab, which means you always stay on top of the original thread.

To check the whole release notes, make sure to head to the linked blog post, especially since Vivaldi Mail also got some serious love.

Bluesky announces $100M Series B →

Well, I am not sure how to feel about that, but Bluesky announced that it has raised $100 million in Series B funding, however, they raised the round led by Bain Capital Crypto in April 2025 already, but it had not been disclosed until now, and that has a weird aftertaste. Why? Because Bluesky has now received a total of $123 million in funding, and some major crypto VCs have participated. Now, Bluesky faces the challenge to monetize their platform in order to generate revenue and pay back the VCs. The addition of another crypto-oriented VC firm probably gives loads of users pause, although Bluesky has not integrated cryptocurrencies into its offering.

However, the fact that former CEO Jay Graber previously worked with the cryptocurrency Zcash, and that work helped inspire the social network's decentralized design, and now major crypto-oriented VCs funding Bluesky, just feels off.

According to TechCrunch, Bluesky has used the additional funds to scale its team, while the company continues to develop Bluesky's app and the underlying ATProto that powers it.

While the technology behind Bluesky might

Mental Wealth

❯ Unscale the internet – “These are the days of being public. Even as we're building shared private internets with DFOS, its existence, ironically, needs public attention, at least to start.”

❯ Onboarding is a transaction – “A design post that’s not about AI. I know. Rare. I’ve been working with two different teams lately, both early-stage, both building something genuinely useful. And both had made the same decision before I arrived: keep onboarding as short as possible. Fewer screens. Fewer questions. Get users to the product fast.”

❯ Why Are We Still Doing This? – “Hey everyone! I know everybody is super excited about the supposed power of AI, but I think it’s time we set some fair ground rules going forward so we stop acting so crazy. Let’s start with a simple one: AI boosters are no longer allowed to explain what’s good about AI using the future tense. You can no longer say “it will,” “could,” “might,” “likely,” “possible,” “estimated,” “promise,” or any other term that reviews today’s capabilities in the language of the future. ”

❯ Social media reimagined – “We’re all familiar with social media: the Facebooks, the Twitters, the TikToks of this silly digital world. They have invaded our lives and taken over our time and attention. We have spent the past decade posting, snapping, tweeting, reeling (?), tiktoking (??). We fall asleep youtubing, only to wake up with our “for you” page completely fucked up because the algorithm lives a life of its own and has decided to profile us as someone who loves sheep herding and carpet cleaning (and, you know, maybe it's right).”

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Appendix

❯ ICYMI

Discover the rise of decentralized social networks like Mastodon and Bluesky as traditional platforms increasingly face criticism. In my post about "The tools for decentralized social networks – How to interact with Mastodon and Bluesky" you can learn about essential third-party tools enhancing these networks, from clients like Ivory and Ice Cubes to cross-posting apps like Croissant.

❯ Quick Bits

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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