surasshu

i am part of a small but tight-knit community of people in the games industry who were active on the now-defunct “fourth website”, cohost. i don’t remember how the conversation got started, but some of us are dabbling in adding webmentions to our blogs and websites, a functionality which is part of the indieweb. bruno is now one of these people, and i have linked his post announcing the addition of webmentions to his blog above.

i also realized that i simply announced that i added “webmentions” without elaborating further, so i’ll try to address this now.

i’m certainly no expert so my explanation might be lacking, but as i understand it, it connects individual, personal websites through their comment systems, as if they were part of a hosted network, like tumblr or cohost or livejournal. it even seems to send an automatic message to the website owner if you link to their article, as i have done above. (if that functionality doesn’t work, it seems a common tactic for anyone who can receive webmentions, is to also provide a form to fill your link in, kinda like walking a letter over and dropping it into their mailbox. the plugin i use provided this by default).

i think the idea of webmentions is pretty cool, i like the idea of connecting to other people who run blogs and potentially joining in on discussions. i previously used a #link tag for the same purpose, and i’ll keep using that as well, but it goes to show i feel that there is a need for it. and since i am using wordpress, i was able to simply install a plugin and have it Just Work (at least it seems to!). something i haven’t figured out yet is how you’re supposed to know that someone supports webmentions, other than them announcing it.

i also had to consider if opening myself up to further connection is what i want–i already have a comment field and the friction that provides stops frivolous comments, so lowering the barrier doesn’t necessarily strike me as being in my favor. then again, webmentions probably have a much higher threshold of participation than a simple comment field, so i don’t really need to worry about it. by and large, anyone bothering to implement and use this would be highly incentivized to be a model web-citizen.