After a bit of experimentation and tinkering tonight, it appears that one can use their website to create threaded conversations on (and likely other portions of the ) using the IndieWeb syndication strategy of POSSE with backfeed of comments using and Brid.gy. I’d outlined the process using Twitter in the past, and the same principles seem to work well for Mastodon.
Replied to a post by Kathleen FitzpatrickKathleen Fitzpatrick (hcommons.social)

@chrisaldrich Another #IndieWeb question for you! I'm syndicating blog posts from kfitz.info to Mastodon, where they appear from @kfitz@kfitz.info, and then I boost from this account. Replies to @kfitz@kfitz.info appear as comments to the blog post, as desired. But if I reply to the comment on the blog, that reply doesn't syndicate here, so the commenter doesn't know. And if I reply to the comment here, the reply comes from this account (and I'm not yet sure whether it appears as a reply on the blog or not). How do you manage this?

@kfitz I’m not sure that the straightforward functionality you’re looking for exists within the ActivityPub plugin (yet), but it’s certainly something you could potentially file as a feature request.

Since you have other Fediverse accounts you’re using, you might be able to follow the same general pattern I’d documented with Twitter for threading comments between my site and Twitter: https://boffosocko.com/2018/07/02/threaded-conversations-between-wordpress-and-twitter/

Generally, you’d post on your site where it’s seen in the Fediverse via the ActivityPub plugin and/or optionally boosted by your native Mastodon account. Replies to your post (on Mastodon) show up on your site as comments and you reply to them there in your site’s comments section. Then you manually copy/paste the text of your reply from your website into your native Mastodon account and include the comment/reply permalink in that reply. If you’ve got Webmention set up with Brid.gy for Mastodon, replies to your replies on Mastodon should then make their way back to the proper threaded spot in your website’s comments section.

An example of this at work can be seen on my earlier mistake:

Related, I’ve been playing around with mirroring my WP site as an instance with the ActivityPub plugin and have boosted posts with my more broadly followed mastodon.social account the same way you mentioned that you were doing with yours. Somehow I’m anecdotally finding that I get more responses/reactions with native posts that with these boosts. I’m curious what your experience has been with this strategy so far? I’m still just starting my experimentation here, but I do like the fact that I’m able to include richer presentation of wrapped links in my WordPress native posts which are seen in the Fediverse while Mastodon seems to strip them out or not allow them (see an example of this in the post above this reply).

Replied to a thread by John-Mark Gurney, Dan McDonald, and Seth Wright (Twitter)
I’m pretty sure that many within the IndieWeb space have got this working with a variety of software, particularly using Bridgy for the responses. Here’s an outline of how I do it with WordPress https://boffosocko.com/2018/07/02/threaded-conversations-between-wordpress-and-twitter/

I’m always curious to see other implementations.

Bookmarked Webmention and Twitter by Manton ReeceManton Reece (manton.org)
After the Webmention session last weekend, I was inspired to revisit a quirk of Micro.blog’s Webmention implementation. Bridgy is an IndieWeb-friendly service commonly used to forward tweet replies via Webmention. If you were using Bridgy to connect your blog to Twitter, Micro.blog had been essent...
Replied to a post by Victoria DrakeVictoria Drake (victoria.dev)
Help me discover more awesome indie webmasters! @ me if you or your favorite blog supports webmentions!

Mine does. I also keep a list of people who have IndieWeb sites and most (though not all) will support Webmentions: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/

Most under the IndieWeb and some under the IndieWeb for Education and Blogger headings will support webmentions.

You can find others by browsing through Brid.gy users, the vast majority of whom will support it as will users of Micro.blog. Another good source of discovery is the IndieWeb webring: https://🕸💍.ws.

If you’d like, you can add a Webmention button to your site to visually indicate that you support it.

Update: Also, if you want to meet some “in person”, I’d welcome you to join one of our virtual meetups coming up: https://events.indieweb.org/

Replied to a tweet by Sia Karamalegos Sia Karamalegos (Twitter)

Sometimes Brid.gy can miss tweets. Here I suspect it’s because of the t.co wrapping as well as searching the entirety of the stream for your URL since it wasn’t a direct reply to your original tweet. Ryan Barrett may have more info.

In this case, I was able to re-force it to send by putting the permalink for the missing tweet into the Resend for Post field at https://brid.gy/twitter/TheGreenGreek. Hopefully it shows up for you on rebuild.

Based on your request tweet, I thought you had wanted your original Tweet to show up in your comment thread, which might be useful in some cases. And perhaps you do want that too, though to my knowledge Brid.gy doesn’t do that. I have a set up on my site that sends refbacks which then parse and display as native comments much the same way webmentions do. Generally this drives me nuts, and I always hide these refbacks from syndicated copies of my content as they look like duplicates.

Liked Bridgy browser extension for Instagram by Ryan BarrettRyan Barrett (snarfed.org)
We’ve launched a Bridgy browser extension! If you use Bridgy for Instagram backfeed, you’ll need to install it (Firefox, Chrome). Please try it out and let us know what you think! Instagram and Facebook have been thorns in B...

My poor little website passed 23,000 comments/replies/reactions yesterday. This is in tremendous part due to webmentions and the ability to collect the conversation about my content across social spaces.

I’m wondering when comments will pass the number of posts (currently 27,648)?

Replied to a tweet by christina (Twitter)
Brid.gy can handle that for you.
Replied to a thread by Nicholas Rempel and Adam Greenough (Twitter)
I need to go back and revise it a bit, but I built a bit of UI for doing just this with Webmention: https://boffosocko.com/2017/12/24/adding-simple-twitter-response-buttons-to-wordpress-posts/

The other piece requires being able to thread conversations. Details for that here: https://boffosocko.com/2018/07/02/threaded-conversations-between-wordpress-and-twitter/

Thirteen: Backfeeding ideas with Brid.gy

Let’s say I syndicate a thought to Twitter. I can use Bri.gy to backfeed ideas and interactions with my Tweet back to my original in my digital notebook (where it’s most useful).  This helps outside ideas filter into and interact with my own ideas.

#HeyPresstoConf20


You knew ideas can have sex, right?!!