IndieWeb Carnival – Community and belonging

A long, long time ago, I signed up to host the November IndieWeb carnival and thought haha, I’m definitely going to forget.

I forgot.

But here I am three days in, encouraging y’all to talk to me about community and belonging. Better (3 days) late than never, huh?

What is the IndieWeb carnival?

Every month, one person signs up to host the IndieWeb carnival. They choose a theme and encourage other people to write or create something about it.

Here are my rules for this month:

• You can write in English or in any language you want. I always support it when the web escapes the domination of the English language!
• If you’re not a writer, you can choose any medium you wish to talk about community and belonging. The only thing I ask is that whatever medium you choose, it’s available on an indie platform – your own website, or a friend’s website, not a walled garden.
• Don’t forget to ping this article in yours, or if your website doesn’t send webmentions, to email me at contact@alexsirac.com and let me know it’s up.
• The deadline to post is November 30th, but it’s a soft deadline – if you message me one or two days late I won’t hold it against you.

I’ll update this post with your creations all month, and may or may not do a roundup post (if it happens, it will probably come closer to mid-December).

Tell us something about community and belonging!

Community is where I thrive. As an « outgoing introvert », I love knowing that I can retreat whenever needed and still belong to a group that I can reach out to at any time when I have replenished my energy. In some other cases, community can be a dangerous concept.

Here are some questions you could answer this month:

1. What do you think of the concept of community?
2. What’s your relationship to belonging somewhere?
3. Do you feel supported or limited by having a community?
4. What’s one community where you really feel like you belong?
5. What makes a community hard to join or to belong to?
6. Do you have a community-building story to tell us?

IndieWeb carnival participants

Will be updated throughout the month.

• Ben Werdmuller wrote about the life experiences, from being a third culture child to caring for a terminally ill old one, that make it hard to belong to a simple place.
• Daniel Mowitz wrote about communities as home bases, that people venture out from and then return to for rest and energy.
• Devastatia wrote about the importance of adding context to « likes » and webrings, and how responding to other people’s blog posts is a great way to build community.
• Jeremy Cherfas wrote about searching for community after the golden age of college.
• Pablo Morales wrote about being multilingual in the US, avoiding his fellow Americans when studying abroad, and being part of the indieweb community.
• Sara Jakša wrote about language barriers, belonging to different communities, having to explain her own aro/ace identity to her therapist, and the importance of supportive communities.
• Tracy Durnell wrote about building community out of strangers through the interconnection of personal blogs and the coolness of blogrolls.

Read more

• The carnival page on the indieweb wiki: find out more and host your own month!
• Also posted on IndieNews