Homebrew Website Club

15 Oct 2014 — Michiel de Jong

Last night was the first Homebrew Website Club in Lisbon. This quickly growing distributed event started in San Francisco, and had already spread to Portland, Minneapolis, and Chicago. And now Lisbon, too! :)

We actually got the bi-weekly phase wrong, all the existing chapters are in odd weeks of the year, we might correct that at some point, so check http://indiewebcamp.com/events or http://www.meetup.com/Internet-Freedom-Lisbon to get the exact announcements.

IndieWeb is a movement that’s aimed at redecentralizing the web within its current infrastructure. We accept that protocols like DNS and HTTPS have their limitations, and try to fix the centralization problem that is happening at a higher level: the “silos” of web 2.0 in which we all pour the content we publish, so that they can sell it back to us, at the price of our privacy.

The basic concept of IndieWeb is the same as what used to be called “blogging”: have your own domain name, on which you publish your content. To alert people that you posted something, we still use rss just like in the blogging days.

But one important thing was added, in the interest of “redecentralization”: IndieWeb publishers generally relay notifications of their updates to web 2.0 silos like Twitter, so that the audiences there are still reached. This is a different approach from most “federated social web” projects, which usually would create a new bubble into which people had to actively join in order to see what’s going on there.

The nice thing about joining the IndieWeb is that you help to redecentralize the web, while at the same time your Twitter followers can still see what you’re writing. More info about joining the IndieWeb can be found on http://indiewebcamp.com/.

A full report of our first meetup is on http://indiewebcamp.com/events/2014-10-15-hwc-lisbon/. Maybe you want to start a Homebrew Website Club in your own city!