loading . . . IndieWeb Camp Berlin 2025 After far too long, I was once again able to attend an IndieWeb Camp in real life, and it was another great experience. Old friends and new, old problems and new too. And some great adjunct events.
The most exciting of those was the journey there, specifically the stretch from Bologna to Munich, for which I was booked in an Austrian Railjet Mini-cabin. These are rather like the Japanese sleeping pods you might have seen, a compartment for one in which, I was assured by The Man in Seat 61, a 185cm person would be quite comfortable. And I was.
Cosy, and not uncomfortable.
The space is a little confined, to be sure, but at my age the thrill of sharing even a two-person couchette with a stranger is gone. You can recline against the outer wall of the carriage and thereâs a window over your shoulder if you do. Bendier people than me, like the person next door, can sit up crosslegged. Sheets, blanket and a pillow are present, but as I had no intention of getting undressed and the temperature was on the warm side, only the pillow got used. There are two compartments outside for shoes and luggage that unlock with the same card that controls the sliding door to the pod.
Of course one wakes up far more often than during a normal nightâs sleep, but at no time was I squirmy uncomfortable as I know I would have been in an ordinary seat. And for some of the awakenings it was very handy to have a light in the compartment that told you whether the (gendered) toilets were occupied. Breakfast was a couple of rolls with jam and a coffee that wasnât horrible. All in all a fine experience that I would do again and would recommend.
Other (surprising) travel notes: The DB trains to and from Berlin were both comfortable and effectively on time. Having to get up at 04:45 in order to get back to Rome within a day was a pain, and 17 hours door-to-door is pretty tiring, but eminently doable, and the stops were such that I could refuel easily.
About the hotel, nothing to be said. Ibis Budget is fully acceptable.
## To Mozilla
Saturday morning, off I went to Mozilla Berlin, stopping immediately after getting off the U-bahn to pick up coffee and a bun. I had kinda sorta paid attention to Mozillaâs instructions but not in enough detail as it took me a bit of futzing around, during which I noticed several better-looking coffee shops a lot closer.
Mozillaâs space is truly wonderful, and it must be a blast to work there. The main social room had huge windows with a great view over the Spree and an array of beverage-making machines including, and I know this sounds like a clicheĚ for a hot tech startup (which Mozilla certainly isnât) but there was one of those bamboo gizmos for frothing up your matcha tea. There was a dedicated bicycle storage room, with tools and, another clicheĚ, a unicycle propped up in one corner. Of course there was. Covid tests were plentiful, and everyone was very chill about testing. Those who wanted to mask, masked.
The best kind of negativity
As for the sessions, they were great and, as usual, I learned a lot.
### Mobile Responsive Web Design
focussed on the difficulty of making the very groovy landing page of NAND Studios as groovy on a small screen. We batted around a lot of options, mostly by looking at some of the many examples on the /design and /mobile pages of the IndieWeb wiki. My takeaway was that sites do not need to be identical at different screen sizes as long as they are visibly members of the same family.
### FeedCity
is a new kind of feed reader by Daniel Pietzsch. I was very impressed by its capabilities, which explore possibilities Iâve not seen in feed readers to date. It is easy to create lists, which can be private or publicly shared and there were lots of other niceties about following individual feeds and other peopleâs lists and all sorts. To be honest, I didnât follow all the possibilities, one of the perils of a quite restricted time-slot. One nice touch is that if an authorâs feed includes an email, an icon allows you to send them an email. Other ways of interacting are sure to follow. Iâm intrigued enough to consider moving from Newsblur, especially if I can find a good way of editing the OPML file of the feeds I follow there.
### Hosting services at home
I proposed and facilitated, as best as I could. My goal was to pick the brains of knowledgeable people, prompted both by the disappearance of my Compass sub-domain after the spambot attack I suffered a month ago and by my discovery of Tailscale. Patrick had some interesting things to say about âjustâ opening a port on the desktop machine and allowing requests to get through. I get that, if you know what youâre doing. Maybe itâs because I was coming out of a spambot attack that took everything down for hours at a time, but that option is beyond me. Luckily, while we sat in the Mall of Berlin waiting for Tantek to finish his shopping, Joschi gave me a crash course in online servers that gave me a greater sense of optimism than Iâve had in a long time. As a consequence, I spent a lot of the journey home reading up on Docker (which still seems very complicated, at least in the abstract) and Hetzner, which has tempted me before.
### Photos
was a session I proposed before the Camp and it got a lot of traction. I was glad Tantek agreed to facilitate. Content ranged far and wide with lots of great insights and approaches shared. I scribbled lots of ideas down and Iâm sure will derive even more when I have had time to read the notes more closely. (Big kudos to Marty who, I think was responsible for the notes, and of course to everyone else who collaborated.) Some surprising things were that if you send a photo to yourself with Signal, it strips the metadata; a good idea if thatâs something you want to do only occasionally. Also, Tantek is currently willing to let Flickr store his photos to embed elsewhere, while here I am thinking I really ought to download all those Flickr photos that Iâve lost over a succession of computer moves. An excellent session all round.
And that was it, for the first day, aside from continued socialising and geeking out over an Indian vegetarian meal. Thanks everyone.
Tomorrow: Create Day.
Also posted on IndieNews. https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/indieweb-camp-berlin-2025
