https://the-federation.info/protocol/webmention
I'm not sure if Aaron Parecki has a public list of all the sites that are using webmention.io, but that would add a huge number as would all the native sites that are part of micro.blog. I'm not sure if either publishes a list of sites using their services for a variety of reasons.
The Message Behind the Medium of a Personal Blog - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
- Each voice is individual and matters
- Slow is ok
- Diversified and independent is good
- Not fitting a pattern is ok
- Not being easily commodified is ok
Just Put Stuff Out There · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer
I’m honoured to mentioned in the same paragraph as Seth Godin and Chris Coyier (and I too have really been enjoying Chris’s writing).
This is very cool! Looks like I need to implement OpenID Connect for my #IndieAuth server so I can get in on this 👀
https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z2QvtE9w5zs49x7WUeG8Ut1vywHDLiG2Wkm9p
https://indieweb.org/Webmention
<link rel="pingback" href="https://webmention.io/www.miriamsuzanne.com/xmlrpc" />
My guess along with some minor sleuthing is that the entirety of the spam you're seeing is of the pingback variety as the mechanism by which webmention works is mean to actively decrease the amount of unwanted spam. Vanishingly little Webmention spam has been seen in the wild.
Removing the pingback link from the header of that particular page (or others that might get linked to with heavily trafficked sites like CSS-Tricks which are often pirated) should solve your immediate problem. Hopefully those who are working on additional anti-spam features will add to these measures to further mitigate this sort of issue for the broader publics' use and adoption. I've personally experienced this sort of "attack" at least once in the pingback space and another using the even older refbacks specification. On my small personal site, I leave them all on however, particularly for the small slice of academic blogging community that still uses pingbacks and the benefits generally outstrip the annoyance. Naturally your mileage may vary and you may consider turning them off.
Of course, you'll probably also realize that the reason the CSS-Tricks notification was caught in spam was because it also came in as a pingback and not by webmetion. (I'm pretty sure that they don't have webmention set up to send them, so their site would have only sent a pingback.)
Many of the older systems, including WordPress which are frequently used by these same sorts of pirates, will still send/trigger pingbacks. Within the IndieWeb space, most sites explicitly sending webmention notifications will include h-cards with author names and timestamps which is part of why Max Böck’s filtering solution works well.
On the positive side, I wonder if this sort of notification behavior might help sites like CSS-Tricks to track these sort of bad actors for help in potential take downs of this sort of piracy?
When @hacdias.com posted about our conversation about post topics I couldn’t stay behind to also formulate my part of it in a blogpost.
Currently I have various feeds for various post types. I don’t want to link them all here, in case I want to change them around, but I have different feeds that only show my likes, my photos, my replies, etc (you can probably guess the URLs).
These feeds are relatively easy to set up: does it have a photo? Then it’s a photo. Does it have a title? Then it’s an article. This post doesn’t have any, so it’s a note. I have a few of those rules set up and they fill these pages.
But when you scroll through my photo feed, you will also see drawings. When you scroll through my notes, there are various topics represented. It is not that bad right now, but that is mainly because I don’t post as much as I could, because I don’t want to bore my readers with topics they don’t want to follow.
On social media, we live a siloed life, and the people on the IndieWeb are trying to bring that all back to their own site. But, in the siloed life, we can pick the silo for the post. ‘Insta is for friends, Twitter is more business, Reddit is shitposting’, something like that. Sometimes the silo is aimed at a certain kind of post, sometimes it is just the kind of bubble you created for yourself on that silo that makes you post a certain way.
On the IndieWeb, I have only one site. Of course I can get multiple – I have – but I like having all my posts in one place. But I also want to give people options for how to follow me, different persona to share posts with.
I do have tags but most are not that useful. Most of them only contain one post, and also, most of them are very specific. I like the indieweb and vim tags, for they are quite topical, but those are exceptions.
At one point (not now) I would like to divide posts up into probably five rough categories. The homepage might still show a selection of all, and there will also be a place to actually see everything, but I think these categories make sense to me:
- professional / helpful for all those posts in which I share something about IndieWeb, Vim, something about programming, something I learned
- personal for stories about what happened in my life, maybe also some tweets, the more human connection
- too personal for checkins, books I’ve read, food I’ve eaten, movies I’ve watched, still about life but without commentary
- art for those good pictures, occasional drawings, fiction stories, the things I post too little
I said five and I posted four, because I don’t think this is final. I might also want to add a ‘current obsession’ category, to blog about those things I am deeply into. (There has been posts about keyboards here, you missed Getting Things Done, currently I am into the game of Go again.)
A last category I might also need is ‘thinking out loud’, as this is a post that would fall into that. For what is worth, I’ll post it anyway.
Selfishly they could use these signals internally for better measuring engagement with articles and particular writers. Is it high quality engagement (useful comments, reads) versus lower quality engagement (bookmarks which might indicate "I read the headline and might be interested").
Highly enterprising publications, and especially "local" publications/newspapers, might consider offering IndieWeb as a Service to allow their readers the ability to have their "own platform" within the publisher's platform/stack. This could be done on a co-op basis or potentially even bundled into subscription prices. Something along the lines of Kinja perhaps, but with more ownership/control/ability to move. Or perhaps a white-labeled version of something like micro.blog, but run/managed by the NYT, WSJ, other?
A well tummeled version of the Hometown fork of Mastodon with "local only posting" could be an engaging thing for a sophisticated newspaper or magazine to create. The publication could have closer control/moderation of the local posting for article related conversations, but people could still communicate with others outside of that "home" server. Alternately, in the standard Mastodon model, the "public timeline" could be filtered for posts about or commenting on the outlet's own content and all other content goes into the federated timeline.
Publications offering their own microsub social reader interfaces could be fun and clever. It could be an interesting way to have a more streamlined reading experience for paid subscribers among other potential options. This could be an interesting interface for helping people build a truly custom reading experience specifically for them, particularly for larger newspapers with large amounts of content that could be better filtered and personalized to individuals.
Am I on the IndieWeb Yet? | Miriam Eric Suzanne
Miriam has a wishlist for scaling up the indie web approach:
What I would like to see is a tool that helps bring the entire system together in one place. Somewhere that non-technical people can:
- build their own site, with support for feeds/mentions
- see what feeds are available on other sites, and subscribe to them
- easily respond to other sites, and see the resulting threads
(Oh, and by linking to this post, this should show up as a bookmark—I’m also testing Miriam’s webmention setup.)
You're right that it's a lot of work on individuals, but there are some emerging platforms/providers attempting to make all of this technology easier on the general public who don't have the time, technical skills, or desire to maintain any of their own systems. Micro.blog is one of these options to be sure. A few others can be found here: https://indieweb.org/Quick_Start With available small building blocks that interoperate, hopefully it will be easier for companies to provide a variety and plurality of tools to make the entire enterprise easier for all of our friends and family.
Congratulations again!
Fixed a handful of bugs this morning, little things that no one notices and bigger things like push notifications and Webmentions broken for the last few days. Think I need to dedicate June to just working on stability.