Webmention.io

by bezelbuttons • 5 years ago

397 104 5 years ago

ivan_ah• 5 years ago

Oooh 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 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback

Another useful related thing I saw is https://brid.gy/ which transforms social mentions into webmentions

crazypython2• 5 years ago

Two-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• 5 years ago

Project Xanadu? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

alvarlagerlof• 5 years ago

And what is a "web mention"?

chewmieser• 5 years 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/

Sounds pretty similar to pingbacks

rektide2• 5 years ago

Webmention 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-webment...

rzzzt• 5 years ago

See the link in ivan_ah's comment: 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!"

kingkool682• 5 years ago

Jinx!

kingkool682• 5 years ago

https://indieweb.org/Webmention

rektide2• 5 years 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

[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/#delivery-mention...

Graffur• 5 years ago

I 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)

slightwinder2• 5 years ago

Have 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• 5 years ago

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.

leephillips4• 5 years ago

Exactly. This kind of thing encourages substantive conversations.

xpe5• 5 years ago

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

javajosh• 5 years ago

Implies an interesting lower bound to on-boarding friction, especially for anonymous services. Counter-intuitive, but clearly a thing.

wiml2• 5 years ago

Right, 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

52-6F-622• 5 years ago

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 philosophical stance.

hashkb2• 5 years ago

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.

slightwinder2• 5 years ago

Pingbacks come from the blogging-world. Originally the concept started with traceback in 2002 and evolved over time. It basically is a mean to create a kind of decentralized conversation where each persons response is hosted on their personal space, instead of a central one. Because of this communications are far slower and smaller, compared to a forum or services like twitter. But they are also usually more focused and of higher quality, because responses tend to be full fledged articles, written to an uninformed audience, instead of some direct responsing text-barf.

toyg2• 5 years ago

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.

davepeck• 5 years ago

Indeed! 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.

blowski3• 5 years ago

When 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.

radlad• 5 years ago

It's been around since at least 2012.

xpe5• 5 years ago

Human 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.

toyg2• 5 years ago

25 years watching the development of the internet, will do that to most people.

epeus• 5 years ago

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

vorpalhex2• 5 years ago

So how long before this gets used for spam ala pingbacks?

blowski3• 5 years ago

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

SquareWheel• 5 years ago

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?

vorpalhex2• 5 years ago

We should realize that any technology without controls will be taken advantage of. There's a reason we've moved away from insecure default logins, unauthenticated admin portals and allowing apps to do whatever they want - those things have all been abused.

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.

pjc50• 5 years ago

No, if you build without spam prevention you end up with a situation where you have to retrofit it, annoying legitimate users and having a huge fight over control.

Or it drowns in spam and everyone quietly drops it .. or it never takes off at all. Shrug

xpe5• 5 years ago

This is a straw man argument. We can and must do both: build and be realistic about misuse.

pmlnr• 5 years ago

https://indieweb.org/Vouch is an extension designed for spam prevention, but it doesn't have a wide adaptation yet.

BeetleB• 5 years ago

It's been around for over 8 years. Is spam a problem with webmentions so far?

incanus774• 5 years ago

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/

kickscondor• 5 years ago

Yeah - 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 along with the link to leave a comment. Static HTML!

tristor• 5 years ago

Do 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• 5 years ago

Can you explain how this works? The blog post is pulling in the webmentions via JavaScript?

incanus774• 5 years ago

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'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)

wholien• 5 years ago

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

xpe5• 5 years ago

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.

incanus774• 5 years ago

Sure, it's a starting point. But its stated goal is to be:

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.

Klonoar2• 5 years ago

I 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• 5 years ago

TIL!

aaronpk5• 5 years ago

I'd happily accept a PR to the docs! I launched this service in... 2012

zoover2020• 5 years ago

This 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.

Klonoar2• 5 years ago

Well, now I look like an ass. :)

I was assuming this was a new thing - my mistake! Makes much more sense now, haha.

throwanem2• 5 years ago

Now you have one! (I fixed a typo and added a note about the presence of a CORS header on responses, too.)

SimeVidas• 5 years ago

Yes 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.

throwanem2• 5 years ago

It's not any more complicated to use than $.ajax ever was; the major difference is that it returns promises by default instead of needing callbacks, and that's a strict improvement.

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.

abraham• 5 years ago

jQuery is still used on a huge number of sites.

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...

pcthrowaway• 5 years ago

So 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• 5 years ago

There are multiple services which solve this problem already, i.e. https://f5bot.com

aaronpk5• 5 years ago

HN does not as far as I know, but Lobsters does! https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/pull/535

tarkin2• 5 years ago

Yeah. 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.

leephillips4• 5 years ago

You 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!

FalconSensei• 5 years ago

Just curious, how you do that with google?

aaronpk5• 5 years ago

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.

nfoz• 5 years ago

Not 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• 5 years ago

Agreed - 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.

aaronpk5• 5 years ago

The 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.

aaronpk5• 5 years ago

Don'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• 5 years ago

It’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• 5 years ago

I don't display pingbacks anywhere on my website, but I like to know when people link to articles I've written. It's personally rewarding for me to know that I'm contributing knowledge that others are referencing and expanding on. These have opened project collaborations for me and allowed me to meet some awesome new like-minded friends from all over.

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.

InfiniteRand• 5 years ago

As a reader, I find clicking through the mentions / pingback links are a good way to find another take on the same subject as the original article

swyx2• 5 years ago

tip 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/

iFreilicht2• 5 years ago

Now 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-f...

swyx2• 5 years ago

i 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.

notimpotent• 5 years ago

Not exactly the same, but I've been using 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.

wiml2• 5 years ago

Previous discussion on HN, "Grow the IndieWeb with Webmentions"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26258557

crazypython2• 5 years ago

How do I insert a comments section with Webmention? What HTML do I add? Preferably via dynamic JS so it's self-updating.

chrisaldrich2• 5 years ago

Maybe this is the sort of thing you're looking for? https://github.com/PlaidWeb/webmention.js/

johnorourke• 5 years ago

Obligatory mention: reminds me of the syndication element of project Xanadu.

dbeley• 5 years ago

I'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• 5 years ago

Wow, I'm not alone. I knew there had to be other Pinback fans out there :)

koalala• 5 years ago

thanks, you just transported me back to my twenties :D

firecall• 5 years ago

I too did not understand what this did!

Is just a service to automate back links?

Like some sort of SEO spam?

mjgs2• 5 years ago

When 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• 5 years ago

I 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• 5 years ago

I 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• 5 years ago

IIRC, the first incarnation of this was proposed and implemented around 2002 by Six Apart. It was called "trackback".

muppetman• 5 years ago

Why 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• 5 years ago

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).

oneeyedpigeon• 5 years ago

So, 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• 5 years ago

Reminds me of f5bot.com, which doesn't require two-way tracking of mentions on Reddit / HN / Lobsters

rasulkireev• 5 years ago

I've been using Webmention.io on my own site (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.

Webmention.io

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