Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of April 22nd - 28th, 2023. https://indieweb.org/this-week/2023-04-28.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 April 26th with virtual meetups at 7pm for Europe and London time and 6pm for US/Pacific time. Discussion topics included deanonymization, decentralization, devices on the internet of things, and more. You can find photos and links to notes from the meetup in the newsletter. Join us again on May 3rd for the next Homebrew Website Club, with a virtual meetup scheduled at 7pm for Europe and London time. 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. 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. --- # Podcasts In episode 40 of the Originality podcast, hosts Aleen Simms and K Tempest Bradford, along with guest Andy Baio, founder of the XOXO festival, discuss whether AI can be creative. They cover many aspects of large language and generative image models, including some of the datasets of public websites, like common crawl, that were used without permission to train them. --- 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. Mark at marksuth.dev posted "IndiePass 0.81 released". In it he announces a return to development on IndiePass, a social reader for Android and soon iOS powered by IndieWeb building blocks Microsub and Micropub. --- And now, a selection of this week's updates from indieweb.org. # New Community Members Alan joins us from alanpearce.eu. Alan is a developer in Berlin, who occasionally writes about Emacs and development-related topics. Alex joins from alexsirac.com. In their own words, Alex likes languages, spending too much time on the internet, and complaining. 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. XXX # Community and Concepts While they may be managed by a community, venue entries on silos like Yelp, Google Maps, and Foursquare are ultimately controlled by the corporations that own them. If you regularly share check-ins or restaurant reviews, consider hosting venue pages on your own site. And, perhaps support IndieWeb-friendly review sites like breakfastand.coffee, which allows syndicating reviews from your personal site. # Services and Organizations Billionaire boondoggle Twitter promised to finish rolling out it's new API pricing and policies by April 29th this week. The changes will leave many organizations with few options but to stop using Twitter, or pay to post at rates upwards of $10,000 per month. As with each of Twitter's recently announced changes, the result has been a new round of exits from the platform, this time including accounts related to New York's real-time MTA traffic info, and San Francisco's city supervisors. # IndieWeb Development As federated social media projects work to attract and support users away from centralized silos, one major theme has been freedom of movement via account migration. While ActivityPub-based services like Mastodon don't currently support moving your posts from one account to the next, micro.blog creator Manton Reese has release a tool to convert Mastodon's ActivityStreams-based export format into Blog Archive format, suitable for import into micro.blog, or any service that supports Blog Archive import. Whatever your programming language of choice, when you choose to rely on third-party software libraries, it's important to stay aware that you are signing up for regular and unpredictable admin tax as those libraries change over time. Now is a good time as any to revisit Ryan Barrett's post on software dependencies titled "We're Drowning", available at snarfed.org. 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.