This week I cemented my awareness of the Webmention standard. I remembered that Alex Schroeder posted about Webmentions awhile ago. But it never quite registered.
My exploration began at IndieWeb’s Webmention page. And into the rabbit hole I tumbled.
I followed Aaron Parecki’s Sending Your First Webmention from Scratch blog post to first add DOM* classes to the HTML* markup of my site.
I registered at Webmention IO to enable a Webmentions end-point for my site. Following the documentation, I added any takeonrules.com webmentions to an RSS feed. In other words, if you send me a webmention, it should show up in my RSS feed. I’m still considering what to do with any mentions that I receive.
Why Does This Matter?
The Webmention standard defines a mechanism for me to “cite” your post and notify you of that citation. You may choose to show that I cited your post. Both of us retain authority over our writing. You can’t delete my post, because it is on my site. I can’t force you to show my post on your site.
This also means, we can have federated conversations without a reliance on a gated community. I remember all of the table-top RPG* conversations on Google+. And because Google owned the platform of those conversations, when they shut Google+ down, we lost those conversations.
Webmention provides a mechanism for notifying each other when we link to each other. And allows us to each own our side of the conversation.
Post Script
I would appreciate someone mentioning this post via the Webmention standard. I’d like to add links back to those mentions, but need to see what I’m working with.
update: Thank you Alex Schroeder for working through Webmentions with me.
I added a build task to publish my webmentions via IndieWeb’s webmention gem.