Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of March 4th - 10th, 2023. https://indieweb.org/this-week/2023-03-10.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 March 8th with virtual meetups at 7pm for Europe and London time, and at 6pm for US/Pacific time. Discussion topics included organizing IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf, organizing issues for an upcoming Pop-up on Microformats, which discussion topics will make it into this audio newsletter, and more. You can find photos and links to notes from the meetups in the newsletter. Join us again on March 15th for the next Homebrew Website Club, with a virtual meetup scheduled at 6pm for US/Pacific 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. In IndieWeb-related events, mark your calendar for March 29th and 30th for FediForum 2023. This two-day virtual unconference will have demos, discussions, and problem-solving sessions with the goal of improving the ActivityPub-powered federated social media ecosystem. --- # Podcasts As the future of social media silos Twitter - and even Facebook - seem to be increasingly in doubt, the 99% Invisible podcast posted a retrospective this week about the familiarity of this boom-bust cycle in online spaces. They recommend episode 420, The Lost Cities of Geo which covers the heyday and downfall of Geocities, and episode 153, Game Over, which follows players of The Sims Online through the final moments when the game's servers were shut down. --- 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. Joel at joelotter.com published On POSSE and IndieWeb. In it, the author details his introduction to the IndieWeb and how he used IndieWeb building blocks to preserve posts on his own site and still reach his community on Twitter. Aaron at aaronparecki.com published OAuth Support in Bluesky and AT Protocol. In it, he notes the protocol's reliance on usernames and passwords, a security anti-pattern dating back to social media silos of the early 2000s. He suggests that the maintainers of BlueSky work to integrate OAuth before the growth of independent implementations makes it more challenging. Simone at minutestomidnight.co.uk published De-brand. In it he dissects and rejects the concept of presenting onesself as a monofocused brand online, as well as the work he's doing to walk back some of the performative branding on his personal site. --- And now, a selection of this week's updates from indieweb.org. 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 The IndieWeb concept of POSSE allows you to keep control of your content by Posting on your Own Site while meeting your community where they are through Syndication. But can you build a blog without /social_media? As Mastodon adn other alternatives try to replace the failing Twitter, author Warren Ellis wants to go without any of them. He's posting about this journey on his site warrenellis.ltd, beginning with listing his site among many other excellent independent sites in the ooh.directory collection of blogs. You've likely heard of Webmention as a way of sharing responses such as comments, bookmarks, and likes between personal sites. But even on personal sites, not all conversations are between just two people, nor do they all stop at a single post and follow-up response. /Salmention - a portmanteau of "salmon" and "mention" is an extension to webmention that aims to connect further interactions, specifying how to send and receive responses-to-responses. # Services and Organizations The United Kingdom's embattled Online Safety bill threatens to add new layers of identity and surveillance to the internet that may even affect personal sites. A major part of the bill aims to ban end-to-end encryption by outlawing techniques that don't support eavesdropping by state actors. This in particular would affect messaging apps, such as Signal, which says they will stop serving users in the UK if the bill comes into law, and WhatsApp, who says they do not plan to remove end-to-end encryption. Green-field decentralized protocol slash social network /bluesky now has an app in beta for iOS devices. As the primary implementor of the work-in-progress AT protocol, there's not much "decentralized" about BlueSky thus far. However, interoperating implementations are underway, and this week the app rolled out support for using your own domain as your identity on the service. # IndieWeb Development Displaying responses from across the web is a great and IndieWeb-friendly way to add social features to your site. Of course, displaying content from sites you don't control comes with challenges like interoperability, and deciding how to /sanitize for security. For example, Mastodon recently added improved handling of HTML content in posts from other ActivityPub-powered sites, adding support for block quoting, headers, lists, and more. One benefit of using semantic HTML in this way, rather than a text-formatting syntax like /Markdown, is the existing support for assistive technology like screenreaders. 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.