Sometimes I think that the way people talk about webmentions (even me) is far too limited. The protocol itself is incredibly flexible. Why should it be that we limit ourselves to reinventing
- Comments sections, or
- Twitter?
Especially when those two things can be more elegantly done (even in a distributed manner) with less flexible solutions.
What are other fun/weird things you could do with webmentions?
His point on Javascript I’m not entirely in agreement with. For one, webmention.io is fully self-hostable so having a static site with webmention content provided at runtime isn’t at all bound to someone’s ability to provide a service for free (I use webmentiond for this). For another, this sounds like something a caching layer was designed to solve if anyone’s site hits Scale. Add to this that runtime fetching of other people’s PII is arguably superior, as this gets into a little. And finally, I don’t think that displayed webmentions are something that necessarily should be machine-parsed. My content is marked up with mf2 because I want to make it easy for people to parse and consume my content. I don’t own the content I’m displaying as replies; even if there’s an etiquette about excerpting for comments-section-type-usage, why should I be exposing it for even-more-indirect consumption?
they’ve changed the rss format since then so I had to change script and I haven’t updated it there, but it mostly works still