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Webmention.io

webmention.io

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Re: Webmention.io

#71

Post by epc »

Mizza wrote: post #33
blowski wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cross that bridge when you get there. If nobody uses, there's no problem. If so many people are using it that it attracts spam, then the users can decide how to solve it at that point in time.

Of course, you are both correct here. Spam was my first thought as well. Back in the golden age of blogging, I loved getting pingbacks on my posts, but the ecosystem became flooded with spam to the point that anybody old enough to remember what pingpacks are will automatically associate them with spam. It'd be nice if this service could address this concern, which lots of people will have immediately, and it appears…

The spam problem helped kill independent blogging by driving bloggers to centralized hosting.

The great thing about MovableType, b2, and eventually WordPress was that pretty much anyone could install it on a shell account and set up a fairly sophisticated publishing system. The lousy thing about MT and WordPress was that it was fairly easy to write automated tools to spam comments and trackbacks and now your unsophisticated bloggers were trying to become DBAs and understand the nuanced differences between MyISAM and and InnoDB tables and locking and…oh…it was easier to migrate to blogger and TypePad and eventually Tumblr/Facebook.

Re: Webmention.io

#72

Post by incanus77 »

wholien wrote: post #66
incanus77 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a ~200 LOC Hugo partial I've built up which reads in the webmentions via jQuery, then parses them out into Twitter, Micro.blog, or "other". If at least one of either/or Twitter or Micro.blog, pull out the root URL and show that at the top of the comments to encourage discussion. Otherwise, parse out like, repost, or plain old mention and add an icon. I also have an HN parser for posts like this one[1] if they'…

was it easy to get it setup? I too have a Hugo blog but other than occasionally adding posts and changing the theme, haven't done any intense partial-building. Sounds like it could be a fun little project

I mean, the JS itself is the 200 LOC, so it's not trivial, but feel free to crib my source as a start. The partials are really straightforward, though — my layouts/microposts/single.html just brings in the webmentions.html partial with one tag at the right part of the layout (i.e. almost the bottom) and then that JS does the work of... whatever you want. You could start just iterating the contents of any webmentions array pulled in as an unnumbered list, then iterate your presentation from there.

Re: Webmention.io

#73

Post by jamesvandyne »

Webmentions are a great way of getting back to a decentralized web. Being able to comment on someone else's site _from your own site_ feels like magic. It brings back memories of the web before social media took hold.

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).

Re: Webmention.io

#75

Post by chrisaldrich »

SquareWheel wrote: post #21
blowski wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we let the possibility of spam prevent us building technology, we should never build anything.

I agree, but I think it's also worth learning from past experiences. Pingbacks do create a significant spam problem. How does Webmention.io cope with that?

Based on experience with Pingbacks, the Webmention specification requires the sending site to have a mentioning URL on a publicly available web page. This requirement by itself cuts down significantly on spam as it increases the cost of sending it. (Pingbacks/Trackbacks didn't have this requirement so it was easy to programmatically spew spam in all directions.) In addition to this, there's no requirement to show the received Webmention, so there's less benefit to some spammers in these cases.

Many people who do receive and display them have separate mechanisms to moderate them before display, which also tends to minimize spam. Other sites that support Webmentions also dovetail with anti-spam services like Akismet which can help filter out spam out as well.

And this is all without anyone adding the Vouch extension to the Webmention spec.

Keep in mind that webmention.io is just a third party service to allow sites to use and leverage Webmention notifications without needing to write any code. Many major CMSes like WordPress, Drupal, Craft, WithKnown, et al. either support the spec out of the box or with plugins/modules. Each of these can also leverage anti-spam methods they have available separately. As an example of this, the WordPress plugin has an allow list for automatically approving webmentions from sites one regularly communicates with.

The idea of Webmentions has been around for almost a decade, and the spec has been a W3C recommendation since 2017. Only one suspected case of Webmention spam has been reported in the wild in that time. I'd conservatively estimate that with 10,000+ independent websites sending/receiving over 2 million Webmentions in the past several years, it's not a bad start. For more details, ideas, and brainstorming for your potential use-cases see also: https://indieweb.org/spam

Re: Webmention.io

#77

Post by epeus »

toyg wrote: post #11

Pingbacks are back, baby! What is old is new again, except this time is centralized, so hopefully with less spam but also less independence once FAANG acquire the service.

Not centralized, this is a tool to enable it for static sites. See other alternatives at https://indieweb.org/Webmention#Publisher_Services

Re: Webmention.io

#78

Post by giantrobot »

hashkb wrote: post #64
52-6F-62 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is closer to how opinion and editorial columns operate in traditional/print publications. 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…

I think modern TV news has eroded all trust that organizations can have more than one opinion / host a civil debate. It's prudent now to assume every news organization has an agenda, no matter how it (says it) conducts itself.

If a show has a host rather than an anchor(s) it's an opinion/editorial show.

Re: Webmention.io

#79

Post by xpe »

leephillips wrote: post #26
xrd wrote: post #10

At first, I didn't get it. Pingbacks, isn't that from the 90s? 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.

Exactly. This kind of thing encourages substantive conversations.

It seems to me it requires some technical setup. I have no illusions that such things correspond with substantive conversations.

Re: Webmention.io

#80

Post by xpe »

incanus77 wrote: post #13

Excellent concept, project & service. I'm using it together with Brid.gy[1] on my Hugo-hosted blog[2] and it's great for bringing in Twitter likes of posts. [1] https://brid.gy/ [2] https://justinmiller.io/posts/2020/12/23/ornament/

I'm not sure it is excellent -- it seems "just simple enough" to get people to adopt it. It might even work for a small community. For now.

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.

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