Last weekend, I rather spontaneously attended the IndieWebCamp Berlin.

It’s been two days packed with engaging conversations, productive tinkering and hanging out with likeminded individuals.

Session Day

On Saturday, it was “Session day” - as always - where we discuss various IndieWeb related topics, suggested and facilitated by the participants themselves. Here are my brief notes on each session I attended.

• ActivityPub: some interesting discussion amongst people that are not too deep into this topic technically. I always have in the back of my head to maybe support ActivityPub in FeedCity. But since it seems to be a rather complicated set of protocols and technologies, I keep sticking to (what I think are) simpler (and sufficient) solutions like WebSub, Webmention etc.
• FeedCity: there was enough interest in FeedCity and feed readers in general, that my proposal about an introduction was accepted. So I told a few new people about FeedCity, presented its features and talked a bit about why I designed those the way they are.
• Self-hosting at home: some interesting input about hosting and/or accessing computers in your home network. I’m regularly thinking about utilising this more - mainly for accessing my Mac mini for coding.
• Photos: definitely some interesting thoughts, mainly about how to post and host. For me, it’s quite a manual process. I’m not too much into sharing photos instantly. I shoot on film, and everything just takes ages. That the posting is rather technical and less slick, really doesn’t matter all that much to me. But nevertheless some interesting thoughts and new input that came from this session.

Create day

The seconds day is the “Create Day” where everyone works on their websites and demos the result at the end.

I myself did the following:

• I Disallowed some AI bots in my robots.txt.
• I fixed the webmentions on my site (thanks to https://beesbuzz.biz for making this webmentions.js lib). They are now only ever fetched client-side on demand, as opposed to be fetched at build-time. This broke somehow, and to be honest, I think fetching and rendering Webmentions on the client is perfectly fine for me.
• I started work on a basic /uses page.

The Webmention bit took the longest time, because I was trying to debug my current library and approach first, before giving up for real, taking it all out, and implementing the new way.

Thanks

After and in between the official parts, it was time to socialise over food and drinks, which was just as enjoyable.

Big thanks to all the organisers, (fellow) volunteers, sponsors, and attendees - on location and remote - who made this happen.