The whole idea of a two-way links like the wp pingbacks in the good old days is getting traction. For more info about this, see https://indieweb.org/Webmention and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback
Another useful related thing I saw is https://brid.gy/ which transforms social mentions into webmentions
I want to see the Web re-become the decentralized, hypertext knowledge graph it was meant to be.
Then, I thought: does this mean the bar for joining a conversation on my publication is that you have to publish something too?
That seems like a nice bar to set for asking both parties in a conversation to be fully engaged. Trolls seem like they will be too lazy to do that.
General reader responses are curated into a "Letters to the Editor" section, whereas the real discussion tended to happen between columnists in their respective columns.
That in contrast to what seems to be the popular misunderstanding—that columnists' opinion columns are summaries of an entire publication's political and philosophical stance.
I remember setting up my blog so I could take a photo on my Motorola Razr, email it to a special address and it would get added to Flickr and then auto posted to my blogger blog.
I went to Glastonbury music festival, which got flooded and took some amusing photos. When I got home I discovered via messages added via pingbacks, that lots of people had found my blog post (I guess via Google search) and linked to it from their blog.
Even now I’m quite amazed at what was possible without Twitter and hashtags, all done using open protocols, and all on our own websites.
Update - thinking about it some more, I don’t think I had the ability to send emails from my phone back then. It’s hard to imagine that because these days it’s just totally the norm. I know that I did have the ability to send MMS messages which could include images, so I must have been using that in some way. In any case, I was able to take a picture while out and about, have it added to Flickr, have it posted in a blog post, and get pingbacks added to comments when people linked to my post, that was nearly 20 years ago!
Is just a service to automate back links?
Like some sort of SEO spam?
[1] https://brid.gy/
There’s an anon comment on this post: https://www.kickscondor.com/the-multiverse-diary along with the link to leave a comment. Static HTML!
I also have an HN parser for posts like this one[1] if they've hit a certain comment threshold.
I don't have any problem with sharing it, but I just haven't published it anywhere yet on account of not wanting the maintenance or support overhead. I think all of it can be gleaned from the page source, anyway.
[1] https://justinmiller.io/posts/2019/09/21/pi-gadget/ (see bottom)
How will it scale as more sites interconnect? I don't mean technically -- I mean socially.
In particular, how does it handle moderation? ... It seems to me that moderation is left up to the site host. That's not unreasonable given the complexity and diversity of what different people might want.
But, in my view, this is only a starting point. And frankly, an uninteresting one that seems to have punted on the hardest problems of networked discussion.
> a hosted service created to easily receive webmentions on any web page.
Combined with that, it's well-documented, open, simple, and to boot, this site in particular is a free service. I'd say that is indeed excellent — a distinction I'd award any service that espouses simplicity, clarity, fills a useful need, and has a JFDI attitude.
Implementation is pretty simple, too. I documented how I handled processing and display of webmentions on http://tanzawa.blog (a system I'm developing designed to make using the IndieWeb easier/less fiddly).
edit: Also, why doesn't webmention.io display its own mentions to utilize the two-way communication it advertises? Seems like a no-brainer to show prospective users an example of it working in action
This is a good idea, and if I were re-making this service new in 2021 I would definitely do this. However I launched this in 2012 as a barebones implementation to get webmentions working for a few of my websites and never bothered to develop it much past that point.
I don't want to a cluster of likes and tweets. But I do want link notifications. I need to rely to Google for this currently.
From the explanations below, I think the person who gets mentioned will receive a notification (email?) from webmention.io (Both people(domains?) have to be registered on webmention.io)
If you want to know a little more about how this fits in with other adjacent social web protocols, I'd recommend the Social Web Protocols document[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webmention
[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/#delivery-mention...
"When you link to a website, you can send it a Webmention to notify it. If it supports Webmentions, then that website may display your post as a comment, like, or other response, and presto, you’re having a conversation from one site to another!"
https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/
Sounds pretty similar to pingbacks
Webmention.io (the submitted link) contains a pingback to webmention forwarding service[1].
[1] https://github.com/aaronpk/webmention.io#pingback-to-webment...
I would love to see mentions implemented in the UX as a completely separate concept from comments, where there is independently maybe a "mentioned x times" in the post footer which can be clicked for a list of mentioners. This could be a cool method for "webring-style" discovery of websites on similar topics without cluttering up the comment experience.
eta: There is also no requirement that the receiver of a webmention displays it! You could just as well use it for private notifications of the links.
I generally agree posting these on your site is going to be sloppy and probably lead to getting spam'd or end up with backlink issues.
For some reason, it makes the whole internet with its billions of users feel so small, for a sharp and brief moment.
Of course we live in our own bubble on HN, so it's quite a specific and targeted demographic already, but still.
I was assuming this was a new thing - my mistake! Makes much more sense now, haha.
> jQuery alone is found on nearly 85% of the mobile pages tracked by HTTP Archive
https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2020/javascript#what-do-w...
That said, I'm glad you gave me a reason to look at the jQuery docs again, for the first time in years. What a 2009 mood!
edit: And if I'd looked more closely, I'd have seen that $.ajax now does return a promise. So that's good! Still appreciate the nostalgia hit.
Security must start in the design. Spam killed pingbacks, and unless Webmentions design with that flaw in mind they're doomed to the same end.
Or it drowns in spam and everyone quietly drops it .. or it never takes off at all. Shrug
A lot of frameworks and static site builders have a plugin to integrate webmentions on one site.
I believe this came from the Indieweb movement, which I am a huge fun of.
This is fact. We need to get used to it and solve the tough problems: identity, moderation, spam, discussion quality, community norms, and so on.
Building a service is often easy. Marketing it is harder. Building something useful to a group of people in spite of human nature is probably the hardest.
