If you're using a web hook to notify your users of changed content, the WebSub standard (https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/; https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/; formerly

If you're using a web hook to notify your users of changed content, the WebSub standard (https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/; https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/; formerly PubSubHubbub; currently a candidate recommendation) is a good option. It solves a couple (though not all) of the problems of web hooks listed in the article, including: - Uncertain security: signing notifications is in the spec - Development and testing: ideally, with libraries that implement the spec, you can assume that the websub part will 'just work' and only need to test your handler function. - Misbehavior is onerous: subscribers need to actively confirm their subscription every once in a while. This might seem complex, but it allows for periodic checks if the server/client is still functioning as expected, and ideally can be handled automatically by libraries. - Retries: the spec leaves some room here, but again, a library can handle this. As I decided to use WebSub as an alternative for a 'plain' webhook for a project recently, I wrote a library for the Flask web framework: https://github.com/marten-de-vries/Flask-Websub https://github.com/marten-de-vries/Flask-Websub. I personally hope libraries for other frameworks will follow now the spec is moving less.