Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of August 18th - 24th, 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 August 22nd in Nürnberg, London, Baltimore, and San Francisco, along with a virtual Homebrew Website Club at Central European Time. You can find photos and links to notes from the meetups in the newsletter. Join us again on September 5th, where Homebrew Website Clubs have been confirmed for Nürnberg and Baltimore, as well as a special HWC Portland in the lead up to the XOXO Festival. 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 IndieWebCamp Oxford will be held at White October on September 22nd and 23rd in Oxford, UK. Registration is open now, so head on over to indieweb.org/2018/Oxford for details. IndieWebCamp NYC will be held at Pace University in Manhattan on September 28th and 29th. Registration is open now, and volunteers are needed. Find out more at indieweb.org/2018/NYC. 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. In IndieWeb related events, Electromagnetic Field will be held on August 31st through September 2nd in Eastnor, UK. Electromagnetic Field is a non-profit camping festival for hackers, artists, geeks, and more, and it appears that some members of the IndieWeb community will be in attendance. Also related, the sixth XOXO Festival returns to Portland, Oregon on September 6th through 9th. Registrations are no longer available, but some IndieWeb folks will be in attendance, so look for discussions about the event in the IndieWeb chat. --- # Podcasts In episode 9 of "An IndieWeb Podcast", hosts Chris Aldrich and David Shanske discuss the upcoming IndieWebCamp NYC, Micropub plugin features for WordPress, ditching Facebook, and Greg McVerry's IndieWeb EDU522 class. --- 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. Eddie Hinkle, at eddiehinkle.com, posted "How I send webmentions to Micro.blog". In it, Hinkle points out a common issue with response posts on self-hosted sites which are also on micro.blog, and details a temporary solution: sending an extra webmention to micro.blog for each response he creates. Jason McIntosh, at fogknife.com, published "State of the Plerd, 2018". In it, McIntosh reviews a year of developments for his open source, Perl-based website engine which powers his site. Among the updates is support for sending and receiving responses via Webmention, which he calls "far and away the most exciting" of the open web standards of the IndieWeb. Vega, at v.hierofalco.net, posted "Weird Indieweb idea of the day: guestbooks." In it, Vega notes recent trends of reviving so-called "Web 1.0" community-building features like site directories and webrings and suggests another one to try: guestbook pages. Vega also posted a piece at vega.micro.blog titled "Diversity on Micro.blog, from a minority viewpoint." In it, they address ongoing discussions about a lack of diversity in the micro.blog and wider IndieWeb communities. Vega sites barriers such as finance, technical know-how, and the need for a technophilic drive to be a "self-made webmaster". Vega adds, quote, "The boundaries of every culture are always being contested, from within and from without. To know what boundaries to bend, and which to maintain, involves knowing (or at least, having a vision or ideal of) who we want to be." Smokey, at ardisson.org, asks "Can We Ever Reset the Field?" In it, Smokey discusses ways that centralized social silos like Facebook have flattened our multifaceted identities. In abandoning these silos, we have an opportunity to gather in places online where we don't have to act as all facets of ourselves simultaneously. If we insist on being able to find all our people in one place - it will need to be in a place that we curate for ourselves. --- And now, a selection of this week's updates from indieweb.org. # New Community Members Kam Black joins us from kam.black. Kam is a web developer at Utah Valley University. 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 As users leave Twitter, many find themselves rushing to join alternatives like Mastodon. However, these users may be trading one kind of silo for another. The Mastodon page has been updated with criticism for Mastodon, including a souring developer culture, a lack of privacy for users, lack of support for users who want to move to a new instance, and more. Sarah Jamie Lewis, at fieldnotes.resistant.tech gets to the heart of the matter with a post titled "Federation is the Worst of all Worlds", in which she concludes, quote: "federation is the wrong model because it concentrates trust, and we must look to building privacy-preserving peer-to-peer infrastructure if we have any hope of building a decentralized future." # Services and Organizations The Twitter quits continue, with some notable quitters including Derek Powazek, Mike Monteiro, and Wil Wheaton. Mashable published a piece about the #Deactiday phenomenon. And Newsweek weighed in, taking the suggestion to leave Twitter even further in a piece titled "Social Media Purge: How to Delete Your Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat Accounts". # IndieWeb Development When a Micropub app requests permission to publish to your site, your IndieAuth provider shows you info about that app, like its name, logo, and URL. To make this data easier for IndieAuth providers to find and process, some developers are looking to the existing standard of Web App Manifests, which encodes this information in a JSON-formatted sidefile. If you're developing a Micropub client or IndieAuth provider, check out the Web App Manifest page for some working examples. Other new terms on indieweb.org this week include: Angelfire, Tweetbot, DiSo Project, Blogmesh, Oath, distributed, Flash, Zero Registration, Free software, pleroma, calendar embed, and muffle. You can 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.