Notes from the Homebrew Website Club #9 in Berlin

The 9th edition of our Homebrew Website Club meeting was held at the extraordinary werkstatttraum in Kreuzberg. Our original plan was to give a Starter event series about the Indieweb movement and its community. The first meeting was dedicated for a general introduction (the next meeting is all about webmentions). As a starting point, we invited friends and all meetup members via group mail to our new meetup format. As an appetizer we linked to the great and short Indieweb introduction by Aaron Parecki.

Unfortunately, not many new members showed up… we still in the progress to figure out how to make our meetup more attractive. Feedback is very appreciated!

At the meeting itself, Sebastian and Sven presented the Indieweb introduction created by Joschi Kuphal. Big thanks to him for such a great slide deck!

Your domain as your online Identity

After our introduction, we discussed heavily the Indieweb hypothesis that your domain is equal to your online identity. That means, the first activity for joining the Indieweb community is the domain registration. This happens mostly through Domain Providers, like dnssimple, netlify, namecheap, or inwx.de.

Github Pages and Glitch offers an alternative to the paid services and they are great for tinker around with Indieweb tools.

During our discussion, we talked about the problem that Domains are maybe not the appropriate tool for your online identity, because the DNS system is kinda controlled by corporate authorities, like DENIC.  This creates another dependance on other big players. That circumstance is not completely true. You can create your own DNS infrastructure, like these services do: OpenNic and Namecoin. The last service brought us into the Blockchain topic. Within our group we were skeptical about Blockchain and its identity provider services. However, we are still convinced that it makes sense to observe infrastructures like ZeroNet and Blockstack frequently. The influences of those new emerging technologies and mechanics cannot be exactly evaluated yet. We are curious!

Domain Identity and Authorization

The login procedure provided by Indieweb (as an example service IndieAuth) caused some curiosity of our new members. The UX idea was pretty cool and reminded on OpenID. The Indieweb movement could offer great toolset for federated identity service. Especially, for weaken this phenomenon:

Setting up a new phone is like transferring your soul into a new machine.

— Amber Case (@caseorganic) June 8, 2017

However, sometimes it was not clear if a domain or an URL is the right tool. Google is also working on that topic (see Google IO Talk). However, our conversation ended with an open result.

At 9pm, our meeting started to fading out. One of our good night beer conversions were about how to sync and keep versions of big files on several platforms (like on a RaspberryPi). Tools like Git-annex, Git Large File Storage, and Git LFS by GitLab can help in that context. A more user-friendly solution is Nextcloud with its smart version management as (dis)advantage.

Next Meeting: HWC #10 about Webmentions

This Wednesday, we are going to meet again at Starbucks Sony-Center, Neue Potsdamer Straße 2, Berlin, Germany (Potsdamer Platz station) for introduce webmentions. If we are in small group, we might switch to a hack session. Feel to join us at the Indieweb Wiki or on Meetup.com