While at the 2017 IndieWeb Summit, I sat down with some of the participants to ask "Why did you involved with IndieWeb?" My name is Josh Juran and I have jjuran.org, which I use for IndieAuth, and metamage.com which is my primary site at this moment. I heard about IndieWeb when I was attending Open Source Bridge and I met Tantek and he told me to come by, so that was my first taste of it. And then I also went to the Homebrew Website Club at Mozilla in San Francisco. And I was definitely interested in what was going on. I'm a software freedom advocate, and I'm interested in people owning their technology and not being owned by it. So I definitely appreciated that aspect of it, though I'm not personally that active in web development. I didn't get too far into it. Now that I'm more interested in presenting things on the web, I've started working on a design for an abuse-resistant communication system and clearly in order to get any uptake that's gonna have to interoperate with other things and it looks like IndieWeb is a good way to start with that. Perfect, thank you! --- Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of September 9th - 15th, 2017. 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 13th in Nurnberg and Portland. You can find photos from the events in the newsletter. The next regularly scheduled Homebrew Website Club meeting is September 20th, with Brighton, Baltimore, Frederick, San Francisco, and a Virtual HWC at Central European Time confirmed so far. Homebrew Website Club Berlin will meet one day later, on September 21st. 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 IndieWeb community member Keith J. Grant will give a talk titled "The Decentralized Social Web" at the Connect Tech conference in Atlanta, GA, on September 22nd. 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. Registration is open for IndieWebCamp Berlin, which will take place November 4th and 5th at Contentful GmbH in Berlin, Germany. Learn more and register now at indieweb.org/2017/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. --- Here is a brief summary of posts collected this week by IndieNews, a XXX community-curated list of articles relevant to the IndieWeb. You can XXX read more, or submit posts of your own, at news.indieweb.org. Eddie Hinkle, at eddiehinkle.com, published a note to his site about beginning to use the Woodwind reader, an IndieWeb-friendly reader that allows posting likes, reposts, and replies directly back to one's own website, available at woodwind.xyz. --- 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 René M, at renem.net. René is a part-time blogger based in Bavaria, Germany, generally blogging about running and other fitness sports as well as all things tech that he likes. He's currently IndieWebifying his static blog based on Hugo. 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 has been created at "2017/Dortmund/notes", detailing the events at the IndieWeb tent at the Campfire Festival for Journalists on September 8th and 9th. Despite bad weather and planning confusion, some interesting discussions took place. The "Posts about the IndieWeb" page was updated with a link to a post by Michael McCallister at metaverse.wordpress.com titled "Decentralized Web Pt 3: Join the IndieWeb". In it, McCallister describes the IndieWeb as, quote, "a way to get used to the idea that the Web should belong to you" and that IndieWeb serves as a bridge to what he calls "the decentralized web", which will require different software and ways to connect. "Posts about the IndieWeb" was also updated with a link to a May 2017 post by Matthias Ott at matthiasott.com titled "Going Indie. Step 2: Reclaiming Content". In it, Ott details the loss of control that comes with publishing to silos like Google and Facebook, and encourages readers to create their own websites as a declaration of independence. The "to-do" page has been updated with two topics that merit some blogging from the IndieWeb community. First, it was noted that it has been two years since Internet Archive creator Brewster Kahle published his "Locking the Web Open" post. Additionally, there are many IndieWeb projects and protocols that are worth posting about in the context of the recent "Decentralized Web" case study from MIT. The "longevity" page was updated with a link to a June 9th post by Brewster Kahle at brewster.kahle.org titled "Collector or Digital Librarian?". In it, Kahle describes himself as a digital librarian who cares about metadata, sometimes even over data. In the context of the Internet Archive's new "Great 78 Project" to digitize collections of 78rpm records, this means preserving information about which albums were in whose collections, as those choices are worth remembering and passing on. Services and Organizations The "Google" page was updated with a link to a September 12th post on thenextweb.com detailing a major outage affecting GMail, Google Maps, and YouTube, among other services. The "Facebook" page was updated with a link to a post by Brad Frost at bradfrost.com titled "Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch". In it, Frost documents the increasingly desperate-sounding notification messages and emails that he received from Facebook after removing the app from his device and laments, quote, "the tricks, hooks, and tactics Facebook uses to keep people coming back have gotten more aggressive and explicit and I feel that takes away from the actual value that the platform provides". The "Why web sign-in" page was updated with a link to an episode of the Note to Self podcast entitled "Escape from Yahoo". One of the main reasons Yahoo users cited for being unable to leave the platform was that they used their Yahoo email address as their identity for many other sites on the web. Speaking of Yahoo, a new page was created for "Yahoo Mail", the email service provided by Yahoo. The page details some ways to extract email archives from the platform, given that Yahoo provides no official means of export. The "Disqus" page was updated with a link to a post by Patrick Lee on medium.com entitled "Beware of Disqus!". In it, Lee described an issue where the comment hosting service would make over 1000 requests in a minute, loading megabytes of useless data. The post includes a response from Disqus, blaming the issue on bad content from one of the advertisers that use the platform. IndieWeb Development Finally this week: The "Caddy" page was updated with a link to an announcement on the project's blog detailing a new license for official binaries of the HTTP server. Under the new terms, precompiled binaries of the non-commercial version of Caddy would serve an extra HTTP header thanking the corporate sponsors of Caddy. The announcement was met with backlash, and the project has since announced that they will remove this feature. --- 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.