Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of August 5th - 11th, 2023. https://indieweb.org/this-week/2023-08-11.html This Week in the IndieWeb is a weekly digest of activities in the IndieWeb community at indieweb.org. It contains recent and upcoming events, posts from IndieNews, and a summary of website updates. This Week in the IndieWeb is sent out Fridays at 2pm Pacific time, with this audio edition appearing over the weekend. You can find the web edition of This Week in the IndieWeb, including all links and an archive of all past editions at indieweb.org/this-week --- # Events Homebrew Website Club is a bi-weekly meetup of people passionate about or interested in creating, improving, building, and designing their own website. Homebrew Website Club met on August 9th with virtual meetups at 7pm for Europe and London time and 6pm for US/Pacific. Discussion topics included scams (like domain name front running, cryptocurrency, and AI generated text), border surveillance, open source contributions, and more. You can find photos and links to notes from the meetup in the newsletter. Join us again on August 16th for the next Homebrew Website Club, with a virtual meetup scheduled at 6pm for US/Pacific time. Also, mark your calendars for the next Galactic Bonus Homebrew Website Club on Saturday, August 26th starting at 9am US/Pacific. You can always find info about the next upcoming Homebrew Website Club meetups and other IndieWeb events at events.indieweb.org. If you're an organizer, please remember to update the site with information about your venue, times, and how to RSVP. All IndieWeb events follow the IndieWeb Code of Conduct, which can be found at indieweb.org/coc. And, all IndieWeb events are volunteer-run, so if you are interested in helping organize, getting the word out, finding sponsors, and more let us know in the chat at chat.indieweb.org. Join us virtually on September 23rd at 9am US/Pacific for an IndieWeb Pop-Up discussing Multi-Lingual Personal Websites. Learn more and RSVP at events.indieweb.org. Planning is underway for an IndieWebCamp Nuremburg for 2023. Tentatively scheduled for October 28th and 29th, it will be adjacent to the border:none conference, which is celebrating its 10 year anniversary. --- Here is a brief summary of posts collected this week by IndieNews, a community-curated list of articles relevant to the IndieWeb. You can read more, or submit posts of your own, at news.indieweb.org. James, at jamesg.blog, posted "Blog about what you want". In it, he discusses his relationship to the idea that a blog should focus on one topic. While his blog initially centered on posts about tech and the web, he has embraced posting about diverse topics like coffee, words, moments of joy, and much more. --- And now, a selection of this week's updates from indieweb.org. # New Community Members fLaMEd joins from flamedfury.com. They've been a citizen of the Internet since 1996 and they love the Web, if not all things *about* the web. Jens joins from meiert.com. Jens specializes in HTML and CSS, has contributed to technical standards, and is the author of books like "The Little Book of HTML/CSS Frameworks". If you haven't already, now is a good time to create your own user page. It's a great way to introduce yourself to the IndieWeb community, and to collect the things that you are working on, or want to work on, for your personal website. For more details, visit indieweb.org/wikifying. # Community and Concepts Discussions about the IndieWeb take place primarily in our chat channels. These are centered around a handful of IRC rooms, hosted by Libera Chat, and connected to platforms like Slack and Discord via bridging services. Until this week, the IndieWeb chat was available on the Matrix network via the official Matrix IRC bridges. Due to ongoing issues around spam, privacy, and more, Libera asked Matrix to disable the bridge, resulting in a shutdown around August 5th. As of this recording, IndieWeb IRC is no longer bridged to Matrix. Bridging may resume if Libera and Matrix resolve the current issues, and you can follow that saga at libera.chat/news. Alternately, a volunteer from the IndieWeb community may be able to set up an independent Matrix bridge that avoids the issues plaguing the official one. Either way, keep an eye on indieweb.org/discuss for changes. # Services and Organizations Meta's Threads - also known as Facebook's Twitter or text-only Instagram - announced support this week for profile verification via rel-me links. These added bits of metadata on profile URLs should help Threads users create verifiable two-way links between their Thread account and accounts on platforms like Mastodon, or their own personal site. OpenAI published some details about GPTBot, the web crawling agent that will be vacuuming up public content for training future large language models. One important note for IndieWeb personal sites - they also published information on how to disallow and block GPTBot from gathering data from your site. # IndieWeb Development robots.txt is a file used to inform web crawlers what parts of a site should or should not be crawled. Instructions in a robots.txt file consist of `Disallow` rules that direct automated systems not to crawl paths that match a given prefix. These rules may be intended for all automated systems, or directed at specific `User-agents`, like GPTBot. As always, you can follow the links in the newsletter to learn more about and add detail to any of these concepts. --- That's going to do it for this week. Thank you for listening! This English version of This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition was read and produced by Marty McGuire. If you have suggestions for improving this audio edition of the newsletter, please feel free to contact Marty in the IndieWeb chat. This Week in the IndieWeb and the IndieNews services are provided by Aaron Parecki. Music for this episode comes from Aaron Parecki's 100 Days of Music project. Find out more at 100.aaronparecki.com. Learn more about the IndieWeb at indieweb.org, and join the discussion via Slack, IRC, or the web at chat.indieweb.org.