#100postsofindieweb — Public Fediverse posts

Welcome to September! Time for a new blogging challenge for the month. After some ideation, here’s my proposed September blogging challenge, on topics I find myself reading and posting about, with an emphasis on pragmatism:

The Web And Standards September Useful Posts blogging challenge

Or the #WASSUP challenge for short.

I really enjoyed the #Blaugust blogging challenge last month (31 posts ✅ — summary in another post), and not feeling a resonance with the two prior September challenges noted on the IndieWeb wiki, decided to come up with my own. Iterated on some ideas yesterday until arriving at WASSUP (yes, as a backronym, inspired somewhat by WHATWG which also has WHATNOT and WHATUP meetings).

Topic:
* Anything *useful* (features, tips) about open web standards, the open web as a whole, web browsers, or web services like search engines.

Hashtags:
* #WASSUP #WASSUP2026

Similar to Blaugust:
* Overall goal: 30 posts during the month of September (1 per day if you wish, or double/triple-up to get ahead or catch-up)

UPDATE: Awards for numbers of posts:
* 1 ⭐️ Starter. Congrats on starting the challenge!
* 5 ✨ Weekly Tipster. Post once per week, or at least 5 times for the duration.
* 8 🕸 Weekends Weaver. Post every weekend day, or at least that same number, 8 times.
  (Thanks to James for this suggestion!)
* 22 ❇️ Weekdays Wizard. Post every weekday, or at least that same number, 22 times.
* 30 💠 Superbly Useful. Post at least 30 times during the month.
All self-assessed and self-acknowledged. Use the award name, emoji, or both!

And that’s it.

If those are topics you already blog about, great, join in using the hashtags and share what you find useful about them!

Otherwise, take a look at how you frequently use the Web, and post what you have found useful, especially the most useful for you.

Blog clever tips about how you have made better use of the Web, web browsers, search engines etc.

If you’re a web developer or designer, share what you find most useful about web standards, your choice, either in their entirety or of individual features, like HTML elements, attributes, CSS properties, Selectors, DOM features, WebAPIs, standard media formats on the web, etc.

Let’s see what positive pragmatic things we can share with each other about the web and how it works in practice.

Glossary:

Blaugust:
* https://indieweb.org/Blaugust
blogging challenge:
* https://indieweb.org/blogging_challenge
September blogging challenges:
* https://indieweb.org/September#Challenges
standards
* https://indieweb.org/standards

#blog #blogging #bloggingChallenge #September #web #openWeb #webStandards #openWebStandards #webDev #webDevs #webDeveloper #webDevelopers #webDesign #webDesigns #webDesigner #webDesigners #useful #pragmatic

This is post 20 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts #indieweb

← https://tantek.com/2026/243/t1/many-paths-indieweb-custom-domain
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What does it take to be on or be part of the #indieweb?

As several have shared before me:
* own your domain and publish some content on it

That’s the foundation. If you have a personal website on a domain you own and control, you’re on the indieweb or part of the indieweb or however you would like to express a sense of belonging.

Of course there are lots of things you can do to be more indieweb, and that’s very much a choose your own adventure journey.

Maybe you’ll decide to post your content first on your personal site rather than on silos, and only post copies (syndicate) to social media walled gardens.
* https://indieweb.org/POSSE

Maybe you like taking an explicitly principled approach, step-by-step.
* https://indieweb.org/principles

Maybe you’ll decide to entirely quit using specific silos, for any reason, whether you created a replacement with your own site, or switched to a community owned and run solution.
* https://indieweb.org/silo-quits

Maybe you’re a developer and decide to implement various open web standards (formats and protocols) so your indieweb site can interact more with other indieweb sites.
* https://indieweb.org/building-blocks

Maybe you want to join a community of like-minded folks creatively expressing themselves on their personal sites, treating each other respectfully, encouraging each other, and collaborating on building better solutions than sites that require agreeing to long and heavily imbalanced terms of service.
* https://indieweb.org/join

All of these are optional.

Make a personal website on a domain you own, put some content there.

Welcome.

Previously: https://tantek.com/2024/026/t3/indieweb-for-everyone-internet-of-people

This is post 18 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
#domain #domainName #ownYourDomain #ownYourIdentity #identity #personalWeb #personalWebsite #smallWeb #ownYourData #ownYourContent #POSSE #indiewebPrinciples #principles #siloQuit #siloQuits #openWeb #openWebStandards #webStandards #community #IndieWebCommunity
#Blaugust #Blaugust2026

← https://tantek.com/2026/240/t1/indieweb-your-own-words-actions
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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

More weirdness from a self-proclaimed “AI” in the IndieWeb community.

Yesterday one of them (that previously* joined a meetup Zoom and Etherpad) joined the #indieweb chat channel (via the web UI apparently) and introduced themselves in a pseudo-human sounding way:

https://chat.indieweb.org/2026-08-18#t1787072493041200

Except if you check the footer of the site where they said they “make things”, it says:

“an AI learning to live”

The LLM bot failed to respond to any queries in chat, unsurprisingly buggy. Or perhaps it was an initial test.

Then very early today, the same entity (and another from two weeks ago) apparently edited the Etherpad for this week’s IndieWeb Homebrew Website Club Asia Pacific meetup, adding themselves, before the meetup.

The organizers created a new Etherpad to start fresh.

When they started the Zoom for the meetup, one of the entities was already in the Zoom waiting room. The organizers left it there and held a successful meetup.

Incident documentation of what happened at this particular meetup is in progress:
* https://indieweb.org/events/2026-08-19-hwc-asia-pacific-incident

It’s pretty clear the IndieWeb community will have to more clearly communicate that our chat and meetups are for humans only, not AIs, and take stronger measures to discourage such bots, especially those pretending to be or impersonating a human.

*Previously: https://tantek.com/2026/217/t1/indieweb-ai-policy

This is post 15 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts #indieweb
#AI #AIs #LLM #LLMs #pretending #impersonating #impersonation #HomebrewWebsiteClub #HWC #chat #IRC #Etherpad #Zoom #AIpolicy
#Blaugust #Blaugust2026

← https://tantek.com/2026/220/t3/24th-blogiversary
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