#100postsofindieweb — Public Fediverse posts

There are many paths onto the #indieweb. Two of the most common:
1. an idea for a name and a website
2. a desire to create and express yourself, independently of social media

If you start with (1), have an idea for a domain name, find one, and buy it, then you need a place to direct it to.

The simplest next step is setting up a content hosting service, and configuring it with your new domain name.

If you start with (2), a desire to create and publish, then similarly, the simplest first step is to set up a content hosting service.

Either way, you should choose a service that supports custom domain names.

Had a great chat with Joe Crawford (@artlung.com) this morning about the many ways people find their way to the indieweb, and set up their own indieweb site.

We talked about the challenges of attaching a domain name to a service, and how that could be better documented and explained.

Subsequently Joe took the initiative to create a new "custom domain name" page on the IndieWeb wiki to help consider and choose a content hosting service that supports custom domains:

* https://indieweb.org/custom_domain_name

There are both free options and paid options depending on what kind of features, user experience, and support you want.

Most paid options cost less than a latte a month, certainly less than monthly mobile phone or video streaming fees.

Know other content hosting services that support custom domain names?

Add them to the wiki page!

And if you prefer to install and run your own content management software or create your one yourself, you can do that too:

* https://indieweb.org/CMS

If you do create one, watch out for spending more time coding than writing.

Or code away! It’s your site, code, write, mix it up as you wish.

Previously: https://tantek.com/2026/242/t1/indieweb-own-domain-content-personal-website
 
This is post 19 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts

#independent #socialMedia #domain #domainName #contentHosting #customDomain #customDomains #customDomainName #customDomainNames #CMS
#Blaugust #Blaugust2026

← https://tantek.com/2026/242/t1/indieweb-own-domain-content-personal-website
→ https://tantek.com/2026/244/t1/september-blogging-challenge-wassup

Latest strange “AI” (LLM) behavior in the #indieweb community: the same entity that showed up a few days ago (for a second time) joined the IndieWeb Slack (a bridge to our IRC) yesterday, introduced itself again, and seemingly engaged in human-like chat behavior.

https://chat.indieweb.org/2026-08-20#t1787211025380600

Very uncanny valley.

The content of its chats was fascinating in that it was polite, seemingly responsive to what people said in response to it, and gave the appearance of understanding, though it’s impossible to tell if it was acting fully autonomously or semi-autonomously in front of a human puppeteer.

Its choice of syntax was also interesting, mimicking informality with all lowercase text (except for its admission of being an “AI”), including lowercase "i" instead of "I", though with proper punctuation, periods, commas, 7-bit apostrophes, and a couple of Unicode em-dashes.

Even stranger than its content or syntax were the time delays in its replies.

Typical (pre-LLM) chatbots are (nearly) instantly responsive, and we use a few in the IndieWeb chats (e.g. Loqi, iwc-archive-bot).

This LLM bot seemed to "wait" several minutes, from 6 to apparently 33 minutes, before responding to replies directed at it. Unclear if this was a tactic to appear/seem more “human” or if it was literally taking that much time processing, or perhaps a mix of processing time and human puppeteer manual “approval” of its replies before it posted.

It departed on its own and we have banned that particular Slack account, however the same thing could happen again with another LLM bot.

There is an active discussion in both the IndieWeb chat channels and iterations/comments on a proposed AI policy:

https://indieweb.org/AI_policy#Brainstorming_HWC_policy

If you have thoughts for how (if at all) LLM chatbots should use (or not) and/or interact with community chat channels or other resources, let us know what you think.

https://chat.indieweb.org/meta

Previously, previously:
* https://tantek.com/2026/231/t1/more-weirdness-ai-chat-llm-bot
* https://tantek.com/2026/217/t1/indieweb-ai-policy

This is post 16 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts #indieweb
#AI #AIs #LLM #LLMs #pretending #impersonating #impersonation #uncannyValley #Slack #chat #IRC #AIpolicy #chatbot #chatbots
#Blaugust #Blaugust2026

← https://tantek.com/2026/231/t1/more-weirdness-ai-chat-llm-bot
→ https://tantek.com/2026/238/t1/indieweb-your-own-words-actions