Echoes of Connection

In 1977, NASA launched two spaceships carrying two golden records into the void of interstellar space. The Voyager Golden Records contained instructions for playing its contents, finding Earth in the cosmos (oh my …), as well as images, a variety of natural sounds, musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings in 55 languages. We didn’t know if anyone would ever hear it. And we’ll probably never hear an echo back from outer space. But we sent it anyway, because the act of reaching out mattered, even into silence.

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Publishing a blog post on your own site can feel like a similarly hopeful act sometimes. We send something into the void of the open web, not knowing whether someone will read it or even respond. The good news is: in this case, every once in a while, something comes back. A short message you on social media. A thank you email. A link from someone’s blog. Or, and that’s where it gets truly magical – a thoughtful reply on someone’s own site.

I really enjoyed Jeremy’s recent post about the beauty of blog-to-blog responses, and I couldn’t agree more: when someone cares enough to take the time to write something on their turf that engages with your ideas, something that adds to it, questions it, builds on it – that’s the (Indie)Web working the way it should. That’s the Web building conversation.

There’s another bit of web infrastructure that we built to hear back from people: Webmentions. In their purest form, Webmentions allow sites that support them to connect to each other by sending a ping when someone publishes a response to something someone else wrote on their site. The site that received the ping can then decide to show the Webmention on the respective post. But if you are using a service like Bridgy, you can also display likes and shares from Bluesky, Mastodon, reddit, and many other social media platforms on your site.

I like Webmentions a lot. So much so that I once wrote a Webmention Plugin for Craft CMS to be able to display them here on this site.

Jeremy notes that he also currently shows a tally of all different kinds of mentions under his posts – but also that he’s not sure anymore why he’s even doing it:

This actually got me thinking: why am I showing Webmentions on my site? Do I care about the numbers? What is their value?

We rightfully often tend to think about likes and reposts as vanity metrics. And we learned that from the corporate platforms that told us that we should optimize these interactions for volume – more interactions, more attention, more likes, more subscribers. All those numbers are always meant to go up, up, up. With every like being a little dopamine hit feeding this addictive feedback loop.

But when those same interactions land on your site via Bridgy, they’re no longer about engagement rates on a specific platform. Rather, they act as a signal – for you in the first place, that is – that your words actually reached someone.

To me, this is both interesting and valuable information. I see it like this: every time you publish something on your own site and syndicate it elsewhere, it sends out a ripple – a tiny impulse into the Web. Most of those impulses vanish instantly. A post or a like on Mastodon or Bluesky quickly disappears into the feed – like an echo, quickly fading away. Ephemeral, fleeting, disappearing into the constant noise feeding the algorithms.

But a like that shows up as a Webmention on your own site, below your post? That’s different somehow. It’s lasting evidence that a person saw what you wrote. Someone acknowledged it. Someone cared. However briefly, you connected. Sure, it is not the same as someone writing a genuine response on their own site. But it is still a tiny little signal that someone, out there, was actually listening. It is a way to measure whether or not something connected.

So, I like to think of Webmentions not as a measure of popularity. To me, they measure connection. Connection to individual people and connection to the community as a whole. Webmentions let you listen into the constant noise out there and, just like a radio telescope, pick up scarcely audible echoes of connection. And, they are a way to feed those echoes from the fast-paced layer of social media back into the “longer now” of your personal website.

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This is post 22 of Blogtober 2025.

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