Replied to a post by Mike Rockwell (mike.rockwell.mx)
Is there actually a benefit to showing the Webmention field on your site? Does it actually get used? It feels like all of the Webmentions are automated through the protocol/API, not manually by copy and pasting a link. I’ve turned it off for now. We’ll see.
There are some sites that have receiving implemented but not sending, and it was primarily meant for that. (This is probably most often people who are using webmention.io as their proxy endpoint by registering and adding a line of code to their header. Something I do with both a TiddlyWiki and MediaWiki installs that don’t have custom software/plugins yet.)

It also serves to help visually indicate that your site supports the protocol if you don’t have a button/badge for it that points to something like https://mike.rockwell.mx/wp-json/webmention/1.0/endpoint. For those that care or are in-the-know there are manual services like https://telegraph.p3k.io/send-a-webmention or http://mention-tech.appspot.com/ which could be used as well.

On some sites I follow, I use those boxes about once or twice a month. I use it a bit more frequently on my own site to manually send myself webmentions from other sites that don’t send them, but which I come across either randomly or via refbacks. 

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Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

11 thoughts on “”

    1. In fact, this conversation is a near-perfect use case. It’s not (yet) easy for me to write a reply to your post on micro.blog on my own site that includes a reply context and have it appear as if it were a native comment on micro.blog. (Micro.blog should use some parsing to strip out my reply context and just post my reply.) But I can make my post quickly enough and just manually syndicate it with a link back to my website. Then, when you reply, I’ll see it via micro.blog and I can cut and paste your response URL, put it into my response box and I’ve got a copy of your reply!

      (If anyone has puzzled out how to do replies to micro.blog from WordPress or other websites that maintains context on your own site and makes the reply look native on micro.blog, please do let me know.)

      cc: @manton

      1. @boffosocko.com Whoa! Wait a second now! What’s this? Somehow there’s a shadow @boffosocko.com account on micro.blog (https://micro.blog/boffosocko.com) that I didn’t create?! And native replies from my comments section on WordPress are being automatically syndicated to micro.blog and properly threaded into the stream?!!!

        What black magic is this @manton?!?!

        I’ll take an initial stab and guess that the @boffosocko.com account is a shadow account on micro.blog because someone here has subscribed to my WordPress site as an ActivityPub instance using the details here: help.micro.blog/2018/acti…

        Can anyone confirm this?

        I’ll leave the duplicate copies of my replies here for posterity. (I’m not sure how I’d get rid of the other one to be honest other than to delete the original possibly.)

  1. @chrisaldrich It shares a little bit with the ActivityPub support but it’s separate from it… It lets someone subscribe to another blog using the domain name and see the posts in the Micro.blog timeline, even if that person doesn’t have a Micro.blog account yet. The problem is that it can create duplicates like this, so I need to make it automatically combine both “accounts” into one. That’s on my to-do list.

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