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Webmention.io
- ivan_ah 6y agoOooh I like a lot. 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 https://indieweb.org/Webmention and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback Another useful related thing I saw is https://brid.gy/ https://brid.gy/ which transforms social mentions into webmentions
- crazypython 6y agoTwo-way links are why people use tools like Roam or Athens research. I want to see the Web re-become the decentralized, hypertext knowledge graph it was meant to be.
- khimaros 6y agoProject Xanadu? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
- alvarlagerlof 6y agoAnd what is a "web mention"?
- chewmieser 6y ago"Webmention is a simple way to notify any URL when you mention it on your site. From the receiver's perspective, it's a way to request notifications when other sites mention it." https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ Sounds pretty similar to pingbacks
- rektide 6y agoWebmention was inpsired by pingbacks but without xml. Webmention.io (the submitted link) contains a pingback to webmention forwarding service[1]. [1] https://github.com/aaronpk/webmention.io#pingback-to-webmention-service https://github.com/aaronpk/webmention.io#pingback-to-webment...
- rzzzt 6y agoSee the link in ivan_ah's comment: https://indieweb.org/Webmention https://indieweb.org/Webmention "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!"
- kingkool68 6y agoJinx!
- kingkool68 6y ago"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://indieweb.org/Webmention https://indieweb.org/Webmention
- rektide 6y ago"Webmention[1] is a W3C recommendation that describes a simple protocol to notify any URL when a website links to it, and for web pages to request notifications when somebody links to them. Webmention was originally developed in the IndieWebCamp community[2] and published as a W3C working draft on January 12, 2016.[3] As of January 12, 2017 it is a W3C recommendation.[4] Webmention enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, referring to, or commenting on their articles. By incorporating such comments from other sites, sites themselves provide federated commenting functionality."[1] 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webmention [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/#delivery-mentioning https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/#delivery-mention...
- Graffur 6y agoI am glad someone else asked this. It seems terribly explained. A picture or video might do well here. 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)
- slightwinder 6y agoHave you ever used twitter? There is a notification when someone answers or retweets a tweet of you. Webmention is basically this notification, but decentralized. Someone responds to an article of you and sends you a notification where you can find it. You then can shiw this under your article and respond back and allow your readers to read all this.
- xrd 6y agoAt 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.
- leephillips 6y agoExactly. This kind of thing encourages substantive conversations.
- xpe 6y agoIt seems to me it requires some technical setup. I have no illusions that such things correspond with substantive conversations.
- leephillips 6y agoI don’t see why the necessity for setting things up means that the system would not encourage a better style of online conversation. Especially if services are developed for less technically adept people.
- javajosh 6y agoImplies an interesting lower bound to on-boarding friction, especially for anonymous services. Counter-intuitive, but clearly a thing.
- wiml 6y agoRight, this is effectively an updated version of pingbacks (pingbacks from ca. 2000, webmention from ca. 2010). See last month's HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26258557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26258557
- 52-6F-62 6y agoWhich 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 philosophical stance.
- toyg 6y agoPingbacks 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.
- davepeck 6y agoIndeed! To be clear: webmentions themselves aren't centralized (and neither are the other various IndieWeb protocols), but webmention.io does provide a very convenient (central) service for receiving them.
- blowski 6y agoWhen did we all end up so pessimistic? An interesting new idea with little more than an MVP, and we've already mapped out its whole demise.
- johnmaguire2013 6y agoIt's been around since at least 2012.
- xpe 6y agoHuman nature finds a way to subvert some of the best intentioned technologies. 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.
- toyg 6y ago25 years watching the development of the internet, will do that to most people.
- epeus 6y agoNot centralized, this is a tool to enable it for static sites. See other alternatives at https://indieweb.org/Webmention#Publisher_Services https://indieweb.org/Webmention#Publisher_Services
- vorpalhex 6y agoSo how long before this gets used for spam ala pingbacks?
- blowski 6y agoIf we let the possibility of spam prevent us building technology, we should never build anything.
- SquareWheel 6y agoI 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?
- blowski 6y agoCross 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.
- Mizza 6y agoOf 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 they do via a plugin, as mentioned in another comment. Since this is a centralized-ish service, it'd be good if they could perhaps address this at the hub-level.
- epc 6y agoThe 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.
- incanus77 6y agoExcellent 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/ https://brid.gy/ [2] https://justinmiller.io/posts/2020/12/23/ornament/ https://justinmiller.io/posts/2020/12/23/ornament/
- kickscondor 6y agoYeah - I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of these services. Along with commentpara.de for anonymous comments. There’s an anon comment on this post: https://www.kickscondor.com/the-multiverse-diary https://www.kickscondor.com/the-multiverse-diary along with the link to leave a comment. Static HTML!
- tristor 6y agoDo you have a write-up on how you integrated this with Hugo and what the trade-offs were? I have an active side-project to add full IndieWeb support to my favorite Hugo theme, which includes WebMentions.
- seanwilson 6y agoCan you explain how this works? The blog post is pulling in the webmentions via JavaScript?
- incanus77 6y agoI 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'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/ https://justinmiller.io/posts/2019/09/21/pi-gadget/ (see bottom)
- Klonoar 6y agoI don't have anything against jQuery, but isn't it a bit weird to have that be the example in 2020? Wouldn't `fetch` just work fine there...?
- scubbo 6y agoTIL!
- aaronpk 6y agoI'd happily accept a PR to the docs! I launched this service in... 2012
- zoover2020 6y agoThis is what I love about HN and puts a smile on my face every damn time. 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.
- Klonoar 6y agoWell, now I look like an ass. :) I was assuming this was a new thing - my mistake! Makes much more sense now, haha.
- throwanem 6y agoNow you have one! (I fixed a typo and added a note about the presence of a CORS header on responses, too.)
- SimeVidas 6y agoYes but it’s worth mentioning that jQuery Ajax is a high-level API while `fetch` is a low-level method. The default call is sometimes (most of the times?) not what you want, and you have to add one or more options.
- throwanem 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pcthrowaway 6y agoSo here's my question: HN as far as I can tell doesn't explicitly integrate with webmention, but I'm assuming webmention.io does use it. Does that mean the owner @aaronpk does get a mention every time webmention is linked, say, from Hacker News? The docs don't make it clear, but if in fact, it does, this seems like a killer concept for HN users who want to be notified (among other times) when their service/blog/whatever is shared to HN 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
- cube2222 6y agoThere are multiple services which solve this problem already, i.e. https://f5bot.com https://f5bot.com
- aaronpk 6y agoHN does not as far as I know, but Lobsters does! https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/pull/535 https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/pull/535
- tarkin2 6y agoYeah. This is my interest. 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.
- leephillips 6y agoYou can also look at the referrers in your webserver logs. It’s just that someone has to click on the link for it to appear in your logs. And you can discover referrer spam!
- account42 6y agoBrowsers are not guaranteed to send Referer headers and some choose not to (or send fake ones) due to the privacy implications.
- nfoz 6y agoNot meant to flame: why do people want these? They always just seemed like spam cluttering up an article's comments, removing the space for actual discussion.
- jcrawfordor 6y agoAgreed - I think mentions are a very cool in principle, but in practice it seems like blog software that supports them tends to just treat them as comments, which ends up being really irritating. Unfortunately this practice has been sort of solidified by platforms like Tumblr. 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.
- aaronpk 6y agoThe good news is everyone who receives webmentions can decide what it looks like themselves! In fact you'll see quite a lot of variation in how these are displayed on people's websites. Everything from a list of comments, to just a list of URLs, to a grid of faces with no text! 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.
- aaronpk 6y agoDon't think of it as comments on blog posts, think of it as enabling entire conversation threads between websites instead of between twitter accounts.
- uranusjr 6y agoIt’s like something between Twitter reply and quoted RT, which both shows up for your own followers and notifies the OP you said something about their topic. Before big social networks were popular, this was a very good way to make new friends on the internet.
- TrueDuality 6y ago
- swyx 6y agotip for those considering this - i use clientside webmentions for this so that it doesnt add to my build times - and lazy load it so it doesnt drain visitor battery/data: https://www.swyx.io/clientside-webmentions/ https://www.swyx.io/clientside-webmentions/
- iFreilicht 6y agoNow that I saw it on your site, I'm absolutely considering it. I think server-side is the way to go, though, as explained by one of the webmentions on your post: https://nicolas-hoizey.com/articles/2020/05/05/jamstack-is-fast-only-if-you-make-it-so/ https://nicolas-hoizey.com/articles/2020/05/05/jamstack-is-f...
- swyx 6y agoi sleep fine at night with the amount of JS i ship on my personal site lol. i'm sympathetic to alex russell's perf complaints, but JS bulimia isn't healthy either.
- iFreilicht 6y agoFor me it’s more about not overloading webmention.io with requests for every single visitor of your site. It seems more respectful to just re-build occasionally and thus cache the webmentions on your side. The performance is secondary to me, though it is an accessibility concern as well.
- notimpotent 6y agoNot exactly the same, but I've been using https://f5bot.com/ https://f5bot.com/ for a while now. Sends me a notification any time specified keywords are found on Reddit, HN, etc. Great service with no fees.
- wiml 6y agoPrevious discussion on HN, "Grow the IndieWeb with Webmentions" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26258557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26258557
- crazypython 6y agoHow do I insert a comments section with Webmention? What HTML do I add? Preferably via dynamic JS so it's self-updating.
- chrisaldrich 6y agoMaybe this is the sort of thing you're looking for? https://github.com/PlaidWeb/webmention.js/ https://github.com/PlaidWeb/webmention.js/
- johnorourke 6y agoObligatory mention: reminds me of the syndication element of project Xanadu.
- dbeley 6y agoI'm too young to know what are webmentions or pingbacks (love the band Pinback though), you should briefly mention what they are on your homepage.
- gagege 6y agoWow, I'm not alone. I knew there had to be other Pinback fans out there :)
- koalala 6y agothanks, you just transported me back to my twenties :D
- firecall 6y agoI too did not understand what this did! Is just a service to automate back links? Like some sort of SEO spam?
- mjgs 6y agoWhen I first started blogging around 2004, pingbacks were very popular. 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!
- Kihashi 6y agoI seem to remember that some providers had some sort of SMS/MMS<->Email setup such that you could email a [phone number]@[provider.com] address and the recipient would get an SMS and be able to reply. Maybe something like that?
- nynx 6y agoI feel like this needs to be more of a browser extension than a per-site thing. You'd be able to see all the places that link to this page that have been created or seen by a group that you're in.
- jazzido 6y agoIIRC, the first incarnation of this was proposed and implemented around 2002 by Six Apart. It was called "trackback".
- muppetman 6y agoWhy does this want permission to read my tweets? That wasn't clear at all putting my website and clicking the submit button. I'm sure it's fine, but I didn't grant it and backed out.
- jamesvandyne 6y agoWebmentions 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 http://tanzawa.blog (a system I'm developing designed to make using the IndieWeb easier/less fiddly).
- oneeyedpigeon 6y agoSo, this is a service that acts as a proxy for webmentions, right? I'm guessing a good use case would be for a static site e.g. hosted on github pages?
- zuhayeer 6y agoReminds me of f5bot.com, which doesn't require two-way tracking of mentions on Reddit / HN / Lobsters
- rasulkireev 6y agoI've been using Webmention.io on my own site (https://rasulkireev.com https://rasulkireev.com) and it works beautifully. 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.