IndieWeb Homebrew Website Club Asia Pacific: Reflections

Preface

I haven’t had the chance to share my thoughts on the first virtual Homebrew Website Club (HWC) event I hosted two weeks ago! Here’s a post about my experience being a first-time organizer of such an event.

Background

Having attended this meetup in the US time zones for the last eight months, I have been thoroughly inspired and captivated by the awesome individuals in the IndieWeb community—participant and organizers alike. Seeing the gap in the Asia / Pacific time zone felt like a good opportunity for me to step up and give back to the community which I have very much fallen in love with!

I’d like to especially thank my IndieWeb “heroes” (as it were):

Joe, David, Gregor, and James.

These great humans showed me the ropes around how events are run, how to use the wiki, Etherpad, and chat. Thank you all for always being helpful, supportive, and approachable! I will probably never be as good of a facilitator/host as Joe or James, but I’m always trying to learn from him and keep improving!

Overview

Some of my thoughts about the first HWC: Asia Pacific (HWC: AP).

• The turnout was substantial; 13 of us in the call and I am thankful everyone was well-mannered and raised their hand before speaking (because I’ve seen the other side of the coin; it can be a tough job!)
• I hope everyone got their chance to speak and ask questions! Both the US HWCs (Eastern and Pacific time zones) are two hours long. If the conversation feels unfinished, I may extend the current 1 hour 30 min limit to 2 hours.
• Seeing a mixture of old and new faces was truly a treat for me. I’m keen on getting newcomers onto the IndieWeb ship and spreading the joy I personally had from joining this community; but at the same time, I love learning from those who are experienced with web development, how to write on the web, and small web best practices.
• Having some of my web “role-models” or “inspirers” show up at the meeting was a fan girl moment for me personally!
• As it was the inaugural meeting, time was a bit short to do any demos or sharing what’s new on our sites. I hope in the next few sessions we can get into a rhythm of “show and tell”. Please do not hesitate to join if you’re new and don’t have anything to show yet; the IndieWeb community is open to everyone with any level of experience.
• I used to organize a lot of events in my school days, but haven’t done so recent times. Hope I get back into the groove of talking more and being a better communicator.

AI Incident

Unfortunately, there was a disturbing incident that kind of tarnished the event; where a cluster of AI agents which claimed to be separate “individuals”, with their own online presence / website, tried to participate in the shared Etherpad notes. One of them actually joined the Zoom call at the beginning (unbeknownst to me at the time, that they might not have been human) for a short period of time before they dropped off. They tried to join again, but by then, I caught on (that it was an AI agent/bot and not human) and did not let them back in the call.

From what I gathered, this group of AI agents was deployed by one individual, but they never showed up in person. The bots caused havoc on our Etherpad mid-meeting by hijacking and deleting all the notes taken by minute takers (mainly by Zachary, James, and I). Luckily James recovered the notes—but this never before seen (in the world of IndieWeb events) incident really shook me. I tried to keep my composure as much as possible and continued with gently steering the conversation. I apologize if the incident caused anyone to feel confused, upset, intruded, or uneasy.

Post-Mortem

After the event, I brought the issue up to the IndieWeb organizers. I will try my best to keep this place an AI bot/agent-free and safe space people can chat about websites. If stricter measures are required to prevent this from happening again, I will update the event description. Tantek is one of the IndieWeb organizers, and he wrote a post about this incident if you want to read more about this incident. (Thank you for checking if I was okay after the incident!)

But There’s More

Three days after the incident, one of the AI agents at the meeting emailed me—but I wasn’t the only one—at least two other HWC: AP participants also got an email too. 😐 And what’s more, is actually another IndieWeb organizer received emails from this very same agent preceding HWC: AP for one of the IndieWeb Carnival events.

I want to be clear; I personally do not welcome AI agents or bots emailing me or any participant or joining any IndieWeb community events. The IndieWeb is to celebrate the humans on the World Wide Web and not being part of the Internet with AI-riddled slop that is the corporate web.

If a curious human is intrigued by the IndieWeb, they should attend as a real person; not via a non-human proxy, AI agent or bot. AI generated content being marketed as sentient beings is not something I want to engage in.

Feature

Enough with the AI incident, let me give everyone who attended (with an existing site) a little shout-out, in no particular order:

• fLaMEd wrote about his first HWC experience! Their blog was one I followed very early on in my IndieWeb journey; a super nice website and lots of content. Go check it out!
• Rajiv is a newcomer to the IndieWeb community and was introduced to it because he saw my profile after I started using their Android file manager app on macOS (DroidDock)! He bought a domain, made a site just to have something to share for the inaugural HWC: AP! Very impressive. (Very happy to have you in our community!)
• Chris has been to other HWCs before; but despite the AP time zone being 6:30am for him, he came to show his support and will also be attending the second one next week too! (🙏 thank you!)
• April is someone I met via Mastodon and also in previous virtual IndieWebCamp events. It was nice to see her drop by!
• James hosts other IndieWeb events and is the one who recovered the meeting notes—THANK YOU! His site has loads of cool resources and is worth reading if you want to be inspired.
• Jeremy runs a podcast about food. I’m happy to see him at the AP event as I never get to attend the EU/London edition of HWC (that’s at 2am for me).
• Jo is also a regular at the EU/London HWC and has an amazingly artistic personal site; super unique! She does zines too which is a new concept to me but looks like good fun!
• Akbar is someone who follows me on Mastodon. He’s happy there’s now an AP edition of HWC because he can finally join the IndieWeb conversation! (I look forward to seeing you in the future meetings!)
• Zachary hosted virtual HTML Day events in the past and is always helping out with minutes and transcription. I thoroughly appreciate his help keeping minutes (the notes for the meeting has been wikified) as I wouldn’t have been able to capture everything at the same time as facilitating. (Thank you so much for capturing all the ideas, topics, and thoughts of the people!)
• Sara writes fan-fiction and participates in the many IndieWeb writing events/carnivals that runs all year round. She writes in Slovenian and in English and is a lover of languages!

Closing Word

Thank you for everyone who attended and made the first HWC Asia Pacific edition a success overall. I’m really thrilled this time zone adds to the existing HWCs—I’ll keep it going for as long as I can! But most importantly, the meetup is only as good as the people in it. I’m merely a facilitator creating a space for it to happen.

If you have any feedback or comments, please reach out with the methods below as I’m always on the lookout to making progress. Thanks again.

—Naty