While at the 2017 IndieWeb Summit, I sat down with some of the participants to ask: "Why did you involved with IndieWeb?" Hi, I'm Ryan Barrett. My website is snarfed.org. I started my website around 2002 and I ended up doing a lot of the IndieWeb "stuff", more or less, long before I discovered a group that was doing it. Generally, hosting stuff on my website and only posting stuff to Facebook or anywhere else that was already on my website. So POSSE, that kind of thing. I eventually wanted backfeed, so I kind of implemented it for WordPress-specific, so sending back Likes, Comments, etc. I was looking for a better standard so other servers could accept this and do this, too. Found IndieWeb, found Webmention, said, "Oh, here's a way to let lots of other servers get backfeed and people can use this service." And so, that's where I found it, and I never looked back. What is the next thing you're hoping to do on your website? A recent project I launched is IndieMap, indiemap.org. I added just today a little view of the social graph, the "IndieWeb Social Graph" centered on me, on my site. So it's me, it's who I link to with kind of rough weights along each edge. So anyone can do that, based anywhere. Alright, thank you very much. Yeah, cheers. --- Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of September 2nd - September 8th, 2017. https://indieweb.org/this-week/2017-09-09.html This Week in the IndieWeb is a weekly digest of activities of the IndieWeb community at indieweb.org. It contains recent and upcoming events, posts from IndieNews, and a summary of wiki edits. This Week in the IndieWeb is sent out Fridays at 2pm Pacific time, with this audio edition appearing the following day. 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. Most meetings take place every other Wednesday, from 6:30pm to 7:30pm. Homebrew Website Club met on September 6th, with meetups in London, Baltimore, Austin, San Francisco, and a Virtual HWC at Central European Time. Additionally, Homebrew Website Club Berlin met on September 7th. Check the newsletter for photos and notes from the events. Homebrew Website Club will meet on September 13th in Nurnberg and Portland, and the next regularly scheduled Homebrew Website Club meeting is September 20th, with Brighton, Baltimore, San Francisco, and a Virtual HWC at Central European Time confirmed so far. If you're an organizer, please remember to update the wiki with information about your venue, times, and how to RSVP. And remember you can always find info about the next upcoming Homebrew Website Club meetups at indieweb.org/next-hwc Interested in starting a Homebrew Website Club in your city? It can be as simple as grabbing a friend and heading to your favorite coffee shop, bar, living room, or any other meeting place. You can find plenty of information about Homebrew Website Club, including tips for how to organize your own, at indieweb.org/hwc There is an IndieWebCamp tent with events at the Campfire Journalism Festival in Dortmund, Germany on September 8th and 9th. Check the newsletter for details on how to attend. DreamHost will be hosting a 20th anniversary party on September 14th in Portland, Seattle, and Orange County. Registration is open for IndieWebCamp NYC, which will take place at Dalberg Global Development Advisors in New York City on September 30th and October 1st. Learn more and register now at 2017.indieweb.org/nyc. And finally, this week saw the announcement of IndieWebCamp Berlin, which will take place November 4th and 5th at Contentful GmbH in Berlin, Germany. 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. --- Podcasts Manton Reece published episode 49 of his short-form podcast "Timetable", titled Homebrew Website Club. In it, he discusses his hopes for the newly-started Homebrew Website Club Austin. --- And now, a selection of this week's updates from the IndieWeb wiki at indieweb.org. # New Community Members A new user page was created for Arnab Das, whose website is at CodeRuse.faith. They recently discovered the IndieWeb from Anil Dash's blog, and have set up a blog of their own, working on a 100-days of writing project. 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 A new page was created for "blindspot", a page that does not yet seem to exist on the IndieWeb wiki. Folks who are interested are invited to create the page. The "Posts about the IndieWeb" page was updated with a link to a June 20th post by Brandon Kraft at kraft.blog titled "The Open Web". In it, Kraft describes the back-and-forth pull of closed silos vs the open web going back to the say of AOL. He dives into some ways that IndieWeb principles and standards can help bring more people into the web, and discusses some concrete changes that WordPress core, or its JetPack extensions, could help. The "social media" page was updated with a link to a post by Matt Haig at theguardian.com titled "I used to think social media was a force for good. Now the evidence says I was wrong.". In it, Haig contends that platforms like Twitter and Facebook quote "create divisions, exploit our insecurities and risk our health". Comparing them to the tobacco industry, Haig calls for more transparency in how these silos manipulate their users. The "IndieWeb for journalism" page was updated with a link to an April 10th post by Jeremy Cherfas at jeremycherfas.net titled "The Undercover Indiewebber". In it, Cherfas praises economist Tim Harford, who writes for the Financial Times, as an example of how journalists and their readers can benefit from IndieWeb principles by making their writing available on their own website in addition to the publications they write for. # Services and Organizations The "create" page, which documents the user experience of creating new posts for the web, has received some cleanups, with details and screenshots about the event creation flow of Facebook moving to the "create event" page. Similarly, the "RSVPs" page was updated with detailed examples of Facebook's UI for creating and displaying RSVPs to events, including examples of changes to the UI over time. The "Skype" page was updated with a new troubleshooting section about what to do when a failed login attempt shows the error "That Microsoft account doesn't exist.". The section includes a link to a tool that can help convert Skype accounts, created before Skype was acquired by Microsoft in 2011, into Microsoft accounts. # IndieWeb Development A new page was created for "Bridgy Fed", a pre-release work-in-progress proxy for federating between systems that support Webmention and those that support ActivityPub or OStatus. While not yet ready for constant use, the service should be of interest to IndieWeb developers who are curious about sharing posts and comments with networks like Mastodon. --- 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 included the tracks Day 85 - Suit, Day 48 - Glitch, Day 49 - Floating, Day 9, and Day 11 of 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.