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What we talk about when we're talking about "Webmentions" - Marty McGuire
martymcgui.re
I have a great fondness for IndieWeb building blocks, and Webmention is a wonderful meta-building-block that connects so many individual websites together. Obligatory "what is Webmention?": it's a specification that describes a way to "tell" a website that some document out on the web links to one of the pages on that site. Sound simple? It is! Perhaps even suspiciously simple. Webmention enables whole new kinds of interactions between sites (there are some great examples in this A List Apart piece).

Sometimes I think that the way people talk about webmentions (even me) is far too limited. The protocol itself is incredibly flexible. Why should it be that we limit ourselves to reinventing

  1. Comments sections, or
  2. Twitter?

Especially when those two things can be more elegantly done (even in a distributed manner) with less flexible solutions.

What are other fun/weird things you could do with webmentions?

His point on Javascript I鈥檓 not entirely in agreement with. For one, webmention.io is fully self-hostable so having a static site with webmention content provided at runtime isn鈥檛 at all bound to someone鈥檚 ability to provide a service for free (I use webmentiond for this). For another, this sounds like something a caching layer was designed to solve if anyone鈥檚 site hits Scale. Add to this that runtime fetching of other people鈥檚 PII is arguably superior, as this gets into a little. And finally, I don鈥檛 think that displayed webmentions are something that necessarily should be machine-parsed. My content is marked up with mf2 because I want to make it easy for people to parse and consume my content. I don鈥檛 own the content I鈥檓 displaying as replies; even if there鈥檚 an etiquette about excerpting for comments-section-type-usage, why should I be exposing it for even-more-indirect consumption?