The week the open web won – Hi, I’m Heather Burns
So to me, this blog represents the original promise of the open web.
The one that’s here, and still is here, and always has been here, and is available to you.
Right now.
The one where you can speak the truths that you believe without the permission, or the editorial control, or the power dynamics, of anyone claiming to hold authority over you; or, perhaps, anyone keen to impose it.
Heather takes a break from her relentless crusading in favour of users against the idiocy of the UK government and reflects on the joy of doing it all from her own personal website.
And perhaps you should too, on your own blog, owned on your own hosting space, using your own words, and speaking your own truth. That sounds like a good little weekend project, don’t you think?
It looks like Kittybox is close to its finish line and general protocol-compliance goal. The only unimplemented parts are:
- In-house IndieAuth (auth and tokens)
- Webmentions
- WebSub pings
Then it will reach full protocol-compliance status, and I could go on to develop other things like pretty UI for posting, the Microsub server (because I really want my own!) etc.
Time to traumatize myself by implementing the entire IndieAuth spec by hand. The newest version that seems to be twice as complex as the one from three years ago.
I’m not sure if I should draft a will first, it seems overwhelming to me... (but I’m sure that in the event that I succeed, I will reap major rewards from it)
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?