In reply to Bryan Alexander.

Bryan, no worries, I certainly know how it can be.

I'm aware of some of Alan Levine's work in the area, but I'm not sure how deeply he's delved into some of the specific tools which aren't specific to pedagogy. As an example, I don't think he supports Webmentions yet (think of them as cross-platform and platform agnostic @mentions), and I find those to be a big centerpiece of the next iteration of the internet. In a sense, they also go toward your issue of people still trying to talk to you on Facebook as tools like Brid.gy can force Facebook to send webmentions back to your site so you're aware of them without needing to really be on Facebook to be aware and interact directly. Though I still post to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram (now only via API instead of through their interfaces) the IndieWeb tech tools have all of the likes, mentions, replies, comments, etc. coming back to my site directly as native looking comments which then allows me to reply back to them when necessary. This way, my personal choice for open doesn't dictate how others may choose to communicate, but still provides an easy way to aggregate the entire conversation on my site and make it easier for me. As an example of this, I've written up some details about how I've set things up so that people who @mention me on Twitter are really communicating directly with my website: http://boffosocko.com/2017/04/15/mentions-from-twitter-to-my-website/

I've been generally enjoying PressForward on my own site and have pushed a few issues on their Github repo over the past year to help make some of my (and surely others') usability problems with it disappear. It wasn't built specifically as a feed reader, but it certainly does that and more. There are still a few pieces that it (and other feed readers) could certainly use to better dovetail into the IndieWeb world. I've detailed some of these functionalities here: http://altplatform.org/2017/06/09/feed-reader-revolution/.

From what I can see, I suspect it's the case that you're using WordPress.COM instead of self-hosting your site using a WordPress.ORG version of the software. If so, then yes, you'd need to have a business account to add some of the plugins that make it easier to IndieWebify your site. (Though I suspect that within the next five years WordPress will wake up and add Webmention functionality into their core product--some of their core committers are already experimenting with it themselves.)

I do know that some people have used http://brid.gy to bootstrap their WordPress.com-based websites to send/receive webmentions. Some of the details can be found at https://brid.gy/about#blogs, but you can add the functionality by clicking on the WordPress.com button on the front page of the site. If you decide to do this, I'd recommend you first create a new user on your installation and name it something like "Commenter" with an appropriate Gravatar so that the incoming webmentions display more logically from a UI perspective. As an example, Kevin Marks is using a similar bootstrap on Blogger and you can see how his webmentions there appear in this sample: http://epeus.blogspot.com/2013/06/how-apples-ios-fragmentation-problems.html. Because of the way he originally registered to Brid.gy, it appears as if his webmentions are coming from him (with his avatar) when they're really coming from other places as indicated just below his name/avatar. This seems to be one of the biggest, albeit cosmetic, issues with using this workaround method.

If you'd like a crash course on some of this, I'm happy to help walk you through it via phone/Skype/Hangouts/other and even help you implement it (gratis, of course, as I'd like to see more in the education field using it both for themselves and students). I'm currently working on a book (WordPress focused) to help non-technical people get sites set up to support this, so your thoughts on the setup and use of it would also be helpful from that front.

If you want to experiment a bit with a separate site that supports some of this technology before going all-in on it, I'm happy to spin one up for you.

Thanks again for circling back around!