Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of April 7th - 13th, 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. Homebrew Website Club met on April 10th in Baltimore and on April 11th in Amsterdam. You can find photos and links to notes from the meetups in the newsletter. Join us next week on April 18th for the next regularly scheduled Homebrew Website Club. Meetups in Nuremberg and San Francisco have been confirmed so far. Similar to the April 4th meetup, which honored sites that are gone from the web, the 4/18 meeting will honor tea. Also on April 18th, Portland will be hosting a Homebrew Microblog Meetup, with drinks sponsored by Okta. 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 Dates have been announced for IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf, scheduled to take place May 5th and 6th at sipgate in Düsseldorf, Germany, just before the beyond tellerand event. Learn more and register now at indieweb.org/2018/Düsseldorf. Save the dates for the 2018 IndieWeb Summit, which will take place on Tuesday June 26th and Wednesday June 27th in Portland, Oregon. The two-day summit will be a part of the larger week-long Open Source Bridge conference. Organizers and volunteers are invited to contribute at indieweb.org/2018. 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 Episode 1 of Jonathan Lacour's Clevercast is now at cleverca.st. In it, he thanks micro.blog creator Manton Reece for the new Wavelength app for iOS, which aims to make it easy to record, edit, and post short audio pieces in podcast form. Lacour also discusses his recent experiments with Amazon's Lambda web service and his hopes to move away from managing servers when it comes to his personal site. --- And now, a selection of this week's updates from indieweb.org. # New Community Members Kimberly Hirsh joins us from kimberlyhirsh.com. Kimberly is a doctoral student at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her favorite thing is helping people learn about the stuff that excites them. Ben Harris joins us from benharr.is. Ben is a Michigan-based software developer who is into full-stack web development. He loves to travel and has lived in Ecuador and Switzerland. 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 "bridge all the things" is a new phrasing for an old IndieWeb philosophy. It prioritizes making systems work together over other concerns like ideology, "Not Invented Here" syndrome, and historical disagreements. Ecosystems are valuable and powerful, and one easy way to extend an ecosystem is to bridge it with other existing ecosystems. # Services and Organizations Jean MacDonald, at macgenie.micro.blog, published "A Guide to Micro.blog For People Who Have A Love/Hate Relationship With Twitter". In it, MacDonald gives an accessible and jargon-free introduction to the IndieWeb-friendly Micro.blog platform, with a focus on their efforts to create a safe and welcoming community. Micro.blog creator Manton Reece announced "Wavelength" this week, an iOS app for recording, editing, and publishing microcasts which uses Micropub to post audio to micro.blog. Reece says that future versions will support posting to other sites that support Micropub. A piece by Eliza Brooke on racked.com dives into the shutdown of fashion community site Polyvore after its acquisition by SSENSE. Polyvore users were not notified of the shutdown in advance, and many are reporting difficulties exporting their Polyvore data, along with concerns about their private data being shared with SSENSE, an e-commerce site that pushes its own products. Danielle Tcholakian published a piece at longreads.com titled "Digital Media and the Case of the Missing Archives". In it, the author examines mass deletions of news archives and questions the future of online journalism as an industry that pays its writers very little, while feeling free to delete their work. Of particular interest are massive profits for owners that shut down publications like Gothamist, and crowdfunding campaigns that pay large organizations like WNYC to restore them. News coverage continues about users quitting social silos. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak announced this week that he has deleted his Facebook account. Katie Notopoulos published a piece at buzzfeed.com about teens who quit or curb their social media use, and why. And Jeremy Gordon posted at theoutline.com that MySpace founder Tom Anderson, who sold the company in 2005, was better off than Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg who this week testified before congress about Facebook's data collection and sharing practices. Danny Crichton published a piece at techcrunch.com titled "RSS is undead". In it, the author notes that RSS is making a resurgence in the wake of a backlash against social networking silos. Crichton goes deep into the many drawbacks of RSS as a platform, such as discoverabiliy and analytics, and proposes some features that a new RSS-based platform might need to succeed. Speaking out against Instagram, Anouska Proetta Brandon, at anouska.net, posted a call to bring back blogging, saying, quote: "It is our very own personal space online. We control it. We decide what content goes up. We decide if we want to make changes to our website. There are no algorithms." # IndieWeb Development MetaWeblog is a legacy API based on XML-RPC for interoperable posting to platforms like WordPress. Aaron Parecki announced this week a MetaWeblog-to-Micropub bridge that allows users of WordPress-compatible blogging clients to post to Micropub-enabled sites. Available at xmlrpc.p3k.io, the service currently supports creating new posts. Users of Facebook seeking to limit the platform's ability to surveil them around the web may be interested in Facebook Container. This extension for the Firefox browser limits tracking cookies and login information shared with Facebook to a single tab, limiting Facebook's ability to monitor your activity elsewhere on the web. Other new terms in the newsletter this week include: tapiriik, Byword, Personal Democracy Forum, Emojitag, and fpm. Check the links in the newsletter for more information about, or to add new 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.