2023/SD/indienewbies

IndieWeb For Newbies R&D Project was a session at IndieWebCamp San Diego 2023.

Participants

IndieWeb For Newbies R&D Project, #indienewbies, Al
- James likes this :) - And Pete :) And Joe :) and Sara and Tantek and Angelo and Isaac and Anthony Ciccarello

Al's thoughts: how to wrap your head about IndieWeb
Goal: blog an explanation of an indiewebcamp
What is IndieWeb?
- What does Loqi / the wiki say?
  - "The IndieWeb is a community of independent & personal websites connected by simple standards, based on the principles of: owning your domain & using it as your primary identity, publishing on your own site (optionally syndicating elsewhere), and owning your data indieweb"
Why is the indieweb?
- why
- personal web? artisanal?
- Wikipedia solves for the density problem by structured guidelines about the first sentence in any article
Obstructions
- "I am not technical enough"
- I am not a developer
- Newbie to advanced?
- How user friendly is the onboarding?
- With Twitter diminishing and Mastodon ascendent more potential interest

Joe: talked to his cousin about their non-commercial web interests, tried explaining it in a more "normie friendly" way
Goal is not to dumb down the wiki
Should ecompass the changing nature of user needs over time, 10 years ago maybe people were leaving FB, later IG, later Twitter
Aside, Added a redirect from /wiki/indieweb to IndieWeb in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Indieweb&redirect=no

Joe: finds himself flailing trying to describe IW; would like a single paragraph as an elevator pitch
Tantek: three points on IW page are solid; challenge is that the reasons people are looking change over time.
- 10 years ago - someone might want to get off FB
- 5 years - get off IG
- this year - get off Twitter
- meta challenge = reasons change over time

David: "the perception that we're a community of developers is a constant misconception"

The wiki could have simpler pages but would need to have clearer distinction of beginner friendly pages they should look at

Indieweb intro video?
- "what is the indieweb to you?"
- 60 second trailer to feature different people; emotive, narrative, friendly and welcoming
- capture the vibe of the zoom hangout sessions in a way that scales in an async way
- photos on the home page?

Does the IndieWeb have a blog?

https://stream.indieweb.org/
- Should it be linked to or discoverable from the home page?

Maybe home page could show a live more recent photo near the top to show that the IndieWeb is people

most recent HWC photos (e.g. that were in the latest newsletter)
most recent IWC photo
Most recent event photo won't always be the most inclusive representation and may give a bad impression
Iterate on improving which links are highlighted for new people to check out

Tantek: putting pictures of people can also backfire; can make the society look more homogeneous or less welcoming than intended
- text is "neutral" in the identity sense, makes it more about the ideas and principles
- ok with discouraging negative people

Joe:
- Goal is to be maximally inviting and minimally discouraging
- Sounds like a marketing effort
- Al: I'd call that "storytelling"

Angelo:

Tantek: You can't get it wrong, when it comes to your own blog posts, you own what you say

Tantek: Wordpress can help with hosting, but people go down the road of creating their own blog end up with an island, no broken social

list the steps to indieweb plugin
David's offering his help with the #wordpress channel discuss#wordpress
wordpress outreach club
micro.blog has social right out of the box, indieweb features are built in - short answer

Distributed Web Infrastructure]