It looks like you’re 90% of the way there. I suspect the last piece you’re missing are the proper microformats either in your theme or in the_body of your specific reply.

Thanks for the pointer there, Chris. You’re right, I didn’t have Microformats 2 implemented in my test. I’ve been using the Microformats 2 plugin. It doesn’t seem to be maintained, but I’ve reinstalled it on this site, and will install it on my test sites too.

I suspect you know what microformats are Paul, but for context and the benefit of others reading, they’re bits of metadata added into HTML as classes that provide computers additional information about what is in your post and what each part represents.

Thank you for explaining this again.

To fix this many people IndieWeb-ifying a site use a theme with strong Microformats v2 mark up like SemPress (or one of its children) and they’re doing it in combination with the Post Kinds plugin which adds the microformats to the response to indicate the proper type. Post Kinds, a dramatic expansion of the idea of Post Formats by the way, also has a built in parser which kindly provides a reply context for your posts as well.

I really like the Post Kinds plugin, and I’m looking forward to when it works with the block editor. I really enjoy using the Gutenberg editor, so I’ve had to give up on using Post Kinds for the time being.

Yet another method to get around some of the required microformats is to publish using a Micropub client in combination with the WordPress Micropub plugin.

Micropub fascinates me, even though I really don’t have a clear understanding of how to use this technology.

For those looking to help spread the ideas and functionality of the IndieWeb within WordPress, we’d all love help to:
Improve WordPress’ core support for Microformats version 2
Better support for Microformats v2 in more Themes

It looks like the drive to add Microformats 2 support into WordPress Core went quiet a couple years ago. It would be great to see a new drive to have support for this, and other IndieWeb technologies added to Core.

I and others have documented some other subtleties and resources for microformats with respect to WordPresss and themes on the IndieWeb wiki which should be of help for those of a variety of development levels. Obviously we still have a way to go towards making all this more intuitive, obvious, and user friendly, but we’re getting there day by day. Any extra help and feedback is always helpful.

The tools have evolved really nicely in recent years. I’d love to see this stuff be better integrated into the tools that people use daily, in the not too distant future.