Webmention | Chris Aldrich

RSVPed Attending Respectful Responses

How do we enable more positive serendipity & discovery via our websites, between both existing friends & family, and new positive interactions. And how do we raise barriers to spam, harassment, and other unpleasant social media interactions.

It's not just "fixing comments", it's much more than that.

Respectful responses include even simple interactions like likes, bookmarks, and reposts, as well as indirect comments like quote tweets.

A broader user-centric conversation about the problem that Vouch is designed to solve one or some parts thereof.

Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash
Hammersmith, London, UK |
A comment on the fragile state of society today, by artist Tim Fishlock

Many who attended @WeAreNew_Public‘s #NewPublicFestival earlier this week may be interested in this upcoming IndieWebCamp pop up session.

Replied to Webmentions + Eleventy Talk by

Sia Karamalegos (sia.codes)

Slides and resources from my talk at JamStack Toronto.

First there’s the details of her post in particular that are cool, but I like how Sia is leveraging Twitter as part of the commenting system on her blog using Webmention and Brid.gy. This way for people who aren’t replying or interacting with their own websites (yet!), they can still take part in the conversation, but she can own it all in one centralized place.

In particular take a look at the great, and intuitive UI she’s got at the bottom of her post:

Join the conversation on Twitter. Or, if you liked this article and think others should read it, please retweet it.

Just click on the link, reply and go. It would be nice to see other social platforms allow this sort of interaction. Setting it up for Mastodon should also be pretty simple too.

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: https://aaronparecki.com/2020/12/10/7/

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 https://aaronparecki.com/replies.

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.

Some modification ideas to the Curator’s Code Plugin

I quietly wonder what it would take to modify the zip file for the Curator’s Code Plugin to take advantage of Parse This to input a URL and parse back a small snippet of context for more easily giving credit to posts in the WordPress classic editor?

It looks like it used to be in the repository, but perhaps with the rise of Gutenberg, they opted not to maintain it?

I follow most of the code there, but I’m thinking too much of the actual output is done via JS with tinyMCE, so maybe I’m missing some of the finer portions. It also needs some tweaks to redirect to maybe the Internet Archive since curatorscode.org no longer exists.

I’m thinking an output closer to the following for each type might still be simple, but provide some additional context, (presuming my microformats aren’t too horrific/mis-nested):

<cite class="h-cite via"><abbr title="via">ᔥ</abbr> AuthorTK <a class="u-url p-name" href="https://example.com/TK" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">TitleTK</a> (<time class="dt-published">2020-TK-TK</time>)</cite>

<cite class="h-cite ht"><abbr title="hat tip">↬</abbr> AuthorTK <a class="u-url p-name" href="https://example.com/TK" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">TitleTK</a> (<time class="dt-published">2020-01-29</time>)</cite>

Hopefully the via and ht classes also give people enough to latch onto for doing some custom styling of the output if necessary.

With more prevalence of crediting like this, I also wonder how parsers might better display received webmentions for these types of notifications beyond the basic “Sue mentioned this”. Maybe a facepile of avatars under the heading “Inspired by this post”? Though the way “via” is used in practice, it might also fit under the category of a repost?

Replied to a thread by Bopuc and Ryan Bateman (Twitter)

I shld be able to hit reply/repost/like on any webpage and have that post to my weblog, and the author of the page in question notified.

That includes news & company & product & ecomm &&&… ANY webpage.
— Bopuc (@Bopuc) December 5, 2020

Arguably, very easy to prototype the UX on my side using #Wordpress
but the notification infrastructure (trackbacks etc) is not implemented at the other end.
— Bopuc (@Bopuc) December 5, 2020

There's a w3c for this.

"Webmention" https://t.co/rwmKbLVKLz
— Ryan Bateman (@rynbtmn) December 5, 2020

And for WordPress you can already use the Webmention plugin and optionally the Semantic Linkbacks plugin to implement sending and receiving them for your own site.

In many cases, sites sending these notifications with the proper microformats mark up means that you can get some really beautiful replies to show up in your comments section (esp. in relation to how the old linkbacks/trackbacks looked). Webmention also has some structure as well as potential extensions to prevent the spam that the prior implementations encouraged.

If you reply to my syndicated copy of this post on Twitter, I’m also using the free service Brid.gy to have Twitter send these notifications to my personal website, so I’ll see your reply on my original post without actually needing to visit Twitter directly. This means that not only can I do threaded replies between my site and another WordPress site (or any other site that supports Webmention), but I can do threaded conversations between my site and Twitter.

Now if you want to take this the next few logical steps, add Micropub support to your website, and start using a social reader like Indigenous. That will let you write replies to content in your reader that will automatically post those repsonses/replies to your website, but then your site can ping the site you were responding to! The specifications allow a true social media experience between websites running different software on different URLs. Some documentation for the WordPress side of things: https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started_on_WordPress

The more sites that support these specifications, the richer the ecosystem becomes.

Lemmy, a clever-looking link/conversation hub

Christine’s recent note that she was only getting webmentions from Lobsters and her update with a webmention example from Maya reminded me about the coolness that is Lemmy, a link aggregator for the Fediverse. I notice that Maya often syndicates her content there.

I haven’t looked deeply into Lemmy’s internals yet. It looks like it has a similar community/aggregation hub functionality that Lobsters and Reddit has. It also looks like it functions like news.indieweb.org or indieweb.xyz. One thing I’d be curious to know is if Maya and gang has any plans for Lemmy to allow users to receive webmentions to comments on their posts on Lemmy. Lobsters implemented this in 2018. Or, with a bit more work, they might allow people to post to Lemmy using Webmention as a syndication mechanism the way indieweb.xyz or news.indieweb.org do.

Of course it looks like they might also benefit from IndieAuth login so that other accounts in the Fediverse might allow them to log in without needing yet another account. I recall Aaron Parecki doing a video about IndieAuth and ActivityPub at the ActivityPub conference recently. This would make implementation easier.

I can’t wait to dig into Lemmy a bit more. It would be cool to have another IndieWeb friendly community hub (and particularly one in the Fediverse) for discovery, discussion, and interaction in the world. We need more projects like these to give people healthier alternatives to Facebook and Twitter.

Replied to Various Updates by

Christine Dodrill (christine.website)

One of the major new features I have in this rewrite is WebMention support. WebMentions allow compatible websites to "mention" my articles or other pages on my main domains by sending a specially formatted HTTP request to mi. I am still in the early stages of integrating mi into my site code, but eventually I hope to have a list of places that articles are mentioned in each post. The WebMention endpoint for my site is https://mi.within.website/api/webmention/accept. I have added WebMention metadata into the HTML source of the blog pages as well as in the Link header as the W3 spec demands. If you encounter any issues with this feature, please let me know so I can get it fixed as soon as possible.

Congratulations on getting Webmentions working! (I love your site btw!)

There are a bunch of us out here that can send and receive them, you just have to poke around a bit to find the (ever-growing) community. Services like micro.blog and those involved in the IndieWeb will (often, though not always) have support for it. Here’s a short Twitter list of people whose personal sites likely have the ability to send and receive webmentions as well.

So far the only site that is sending me webmentions is @lobsters 🙁

— Cadey A. Ratio (@theprincessxena) December 1, 2020

One of the largest senders is Brid.gy which sends Webmentions on behalf of services like Twitter, Mastodon, Instagram, etc. If you set your site up to syndicate content to those sources and register with Brid.gy, it will send likes, replies, comments, etc. to your site as webmentions. Ideally this is meant to aggregate all the conversation around your posts to your own site.

Are you displaying them on your site as well?

As a visual indicator on posts, I took an extra step to add a Webmention button/badge and a URL field to my posts with a note about webmentions so that people could send them manually even if their platform/CMS isn’t capable of doing it automatically yet. (I don’t have a lot of direct evidence yet that these things help except for edge cases, or when I want to force mentions of my website from my referral logs.)