Replied to a thread by Scott Jenson (Twitter)

#indieweb folks. there are a ton of self hosted commenting systems. But what about a "universal comment" system? Where all of my comments, on any site I use, are just links back to my server. I own/host all of my comments. I'm assuming this has been discussed?
— Scott Jenson (@scottjenson) December 10, 2020

This sounds like what Webmention enables. This tweet for example is actually a copy of my reply to you that I've posted to my website. It works directly from site to site too of course.
— Aaron Parecki (@aaronpk) December 10, 2020

Excellent thanks. What would be the 'next step'? If we could get social networks to have the tweets/comments ONLY be a link to your website what does that buy us? I appreciate the solution you have but it's about working within the current siloed approach
— Scott Jenson (@scottjenson) December 10, 2020

Aaron’s site is so advanced, his replies on Twitter don’t have a permalink back to his site. So you’re missing out on the way he replies and collects replies/likes/reposts. See:
Mine is less so; you’ll see my permalink on Twitter back to my original.

It doesn’t look like he threads his entire conversations (publicly), but you can currently see the contexts and replies from your conversations at

A difference you’ll notice is that Twitter caps me at 280 characters, while I can waffle on for days and Aaron’s website will likely (but doesn’t have to) capture it.

Webmention also allows for editing/sending updates, so I can edit after-the-fact and Aaron’s site will show it whereas Twitter doesn’t allow edits, so… I could also delete my response in the future and send a “410 webmention” and Aaron’s site should delete it.

I’m sure that Twitter, Facebook, and most other social media systems could implement sending/receiving webmentions in under a week (even if they’re dragging their feet on a well written spec) and add microformats to make cross-site notifications and comments a reality. It will assuredly require legislation for them to do so however.

Many common CMSes already support Webmention either natively or with plugins/modules, so there’s some pretty solid proof of interoperability with various software and programming languages.