Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of June 30th - July 6th, 2018. 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. Most meetings take place every other Wednesday, from 6:30pm to 7:30pm. A virtual Homebrew Website Club was held on July 4th at 5:30pm Central European Time. Join us again next week on July 11th for another Homebrew Website Club. Nurnberg, Baltimore, and San Francisco have confirmed meetups 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 The third IndieWebCamp Nuremberg will take place on October 20th and 21st, 2018, as part of Nuremberg Web Week. Volunteers can help with organizing at indieweb.org/2018/Nuremberg. And save the date for IndieWebCamp Berlin, which will be held on November 3rd and 4th. You can learn more and lend a hand organizing at indieweb.org/2018/Berlin. 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. Details are shaping up for several IndieWeb-related events around the upcoming 2018 Decentralized Web Summit in San Francisco on July 31st through August 3rd. While the content of the summit is already of interest to the IndieWeb community, there will also be a one-day IndieWebCamp at Mozilla's San Francisco offices on July 31st, followed by the DWeb Summit pre-party at the Internet Archive. --- 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. Ton Zijlstra, at zylstra.org, published "My Ideal RSS Reader". In it, he details how he currently subscribes to people's posts, organized into folders by a hand-picked "social-distance" metric. He speculates about tools that might improve his reading experience by summarizing common topics others are writing about, or allowing him to search the posts of people he follows for writing about certain topics or questions. Kicks Condor, at kickscondor.com, published "Things We Left in the Old Web". In it, the author examines depersonalizing trends in web design over the years, such as leaving behind bright colors and animations of personal homepages for aggregators that pack content into, quote "a makeshift public shelter of dreary gray and white and chalked around with a little line of blue." Manton Reece, at manton.org, published "The web is the social network". In it, he takes inspiration from Brent Simmons, who says that for a decade stretching from the mid-nineties to the mid-2000s, before the rise of social silos like Twitter and Facebook, the web was the social network. Manton hopes, with a focus on domain names and portability, that his service micro.blog will enable the next phase of the web to be the social network again. Manton also published "IndieWeb Summit 2018 wrap-up", in which he recounts his trip to Portland for the IndieWeb Summit. During the trip he and Jean MacDonald gave a talk about the micro.blog community and hosted a meetup for micro.blog users. He also rolled out support for IndieAuth to all micro.blog users, as well as support for tracking books to read with IndieBookClub. Aaron Parecki, at aaronparecki.com, published "Sending your First Webmention from Scratch". In it, Parecki gives a hands-on demonstration of how Webmentions enable social interactions between personal sites. The tutorial begins with a barebones response post before layering on microformats2-based features like author's photo and name, showing the response's content as a reply, adding automation, and more. --- And now, a selection of this week's updates from indieweb.org. # New Community Members Ted Tschopp joins us from tedt.org. Ted loves working in technology, as it provides him with the opportunity to watch the future unfold. Some of the things he has worked on were considered science-fiction when he was in school, which means he gets to work on hard problems with brilliant people using complex and cool tools. Vanessa Hamshere joins us from vanessahamshere.uk. Vanessa works as a manager in an outsourcing company, but prefers to be defined by her hobbies rather than her day job: musician, photographer, crafter. Steve Streza joins us from stevestreza.com. Steve is a technology, design, and bacon lover, as well as a software engineer in San Francisco, California. 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 IndieWeb.xyz is a directory of links organized into category-based "subs", similar to Reddit. Posting and upvoting posts is all done via Webmention. In the words of the site's creator, Kicks Condor, quote, "indieweb.xyz takes the approach that self-promotion of your blog is not bad, it's necessary in order to find an audience when you're starting out or joining communities." Two new videos about the IndieWeb were shared this week. First up, Jeremy Keith spoke about the building blocks of the IndieWeb at the Design 4 Drupal conference, in Boston. The video includes about a half-hour Q&A session at the end. Additionally, name.com, one of the sponsors of the 2018 IndieWeb Summit, posted a brief interview with IndieWeb co-founder Tantek Çelik. If you've ever heard me badly pronounce your name on this podcast, here is a new challenge! Add an audio file of your preferred pronunciation to your homepage, and add yourself to the list of examples on indieweb.org/pronunciation. I'll give you a shout out here on the podcast, and hopefully I'll even be able to pronounce your name as you prefer it! # Services and Organizations Facebook announced that it will be shutting down three different apps over the coming weeks. Moves, was a fitness and location tracking app that Facebook acquired in 2014. Hello was a 2015 caller-id app that linked phone numbers to Facebook profiles. tbh was an "anonymous compliment" app for teens that Facebook acquired in late 2017. In their announcement about the shutdowns, Facebook said, quote, "we need to prioritize our work so we don’t spread ourselves too thin. And it’s only by trial and error that we’ll create great social experiences for people." Speaking of Facebook, author Cory Doctorow published a piece on locusmag.com titled "Zuck's Empire of Oily Rags". In it, he explains that surveillance-driven targeting is effective because it can be used to find and activate people with fringe beliefs which would otherwise be impossible to find. He points out that surveillance-financed companies like Facebook externalize the true cost of their businesses, saying, quote, "dossiers on billions of people hold the power to wreak almost unimaginable harm, and yet, each dossier brings in just a few dollars a year. For commercial surveillance to be cost effective, it has to socialize all the risks associated with mass surveillance and privatize all the gains." Privacy-first personal data regulations like Europe's GDPR appear to be making their way to the United States. California recently passed the California Consumer Privacy Act, which seeks to give people access to data that companies hold on them, as well as control over how and with whom that data is shared, including punishments for companies that leak individuals' private data. # IndieWeb Development Looking for help with your Ruby project? Need a code review? Check indieweb.org/Ruby for a list of folks in the community who might be able to help. Among those is Jason Garber of sixtwothree.org who has recently published several Ruby gems related to Webmentions and adding features like headers and redirects to Jekyll-based sites on the Netlify hosting service. Aaron Parecki has been experimenting with new features that will let his site interact with federated social networks like Mastodon, including the ability to accept incoming replies, to notify followers of new posts, and more. Check out indieweb.org/ActivityPub for details on how these features work. IndiePaper is a new "read later" style service from Jonathan Lacour that aims to let users quickly save articles to their Micropub-enabled website or indie reader using bookmarkets, workflows, or sharing targets. The project source is availble on GitHub, or you can use the public demo at indiepaper.io. Lacour also recently published a new plugin for the Known CMS. "GitHub for Known" allows the posting of GitHub issues and issue comments to your own site, with syndication to GitHub handled via the Bridgy service. Other new pages added to indieweb.org this week include: organization, GoAccess, Sinatra, Semantic HTML, Permalike, and content warning. Follow the links in the newsletter to learn more about, or add detail to, these new terms. --- 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.