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Our speakers this month are Jon Lebkowsky and Tom Brown.

Jon Lebkowsky is cofounder, co-host, editor and sometimes blogger at Plutopia News Network, which is a freewheeling independent media organization co-operated with cofounder Scoop Sweeney. Jon is an authority on, and evangelist for, computer-mediated communications, virtual communities, and online social networks. He has been a writer, editor, publisher and digital culture maven. He also worked in various capacities as a project manager, systems analyst, technology director, and online community developer. He’s a greybeard, a meditator, and wishes he could play the sax.

Tom Brown is an open source software developer interested in digital identity, and he often attends Internet Identity Workshop and more recently IndiewebCamps. Tom has added open standards related to identity to several popular software projects. He can be found online as herestomwiththeweather.

The Wikipedia article describes IndieWeb as “a community of people building software to enable personal, independently hosted websites to independently maintain their social data on their own web domains rather than on large, centralized social networking services.” It’s been percolating for over a decade, and we’re finally at a point, with the Musk acquisition of Twitter, where people are saying enough is enough, we need clear alternatives to corporate social media platforms. Mastodon is the IndieWeb equivalent of Twitter, and many who are leaving the Musk version of Twitter are going there. Jon Lebkowsky and Tom Brown will talk about IndieWeb in general, Mastodon in particular, and the potential future of the web and the “Fediverse.”