I keep bringing up "Webmentions" in the context of discussing the sociable web and advocating for more people to adopt more social technologies on their websites, but I always run into a wall: there's no good place to link people to so they can understand more about what that means. All the existing explanations I've found are deep in the weeds of how Webmentions work on a technical level, which isn't a very helpful place to start for people who just want to post.

I want to fill that gap with this post, and give people who don't know the ins and outs of HTTP a working understanding of what Webmentions do and how to get them up and running for your site. To that end:

Webmentions are a way to let a website know that you linked to it.

That's it! At it's core, it's just that simple. If a website supports Webmentions, you tell it "Hey, here's the URL of a page with a link to you", it double-checks that the link actually exists, and then it does what it pleases with that information.

What can you do with Webmentions?

Notifications

The simplest thing you can do is just look at the Webmentions you receive like a notifications feed on a social media site, and appreciate that people like what you're up to. I get all my Webmentions delivered to me as an RSS feed (more on that below), and I'll always check out the links to see what people are saying.

In addition to being the easiest to set up, I think this is actually the most useful thing to do with Webmentions. Having a way to see when people reply to your posts makes conversation possible and seeing people's appreciation encourages performance. Even if you never go beyond using Webmentions as pure notifications, it's a great way to become more interconnected.

Replies as comments

If someone makes a post on their blog that's replying to yours and sends you a Webmention, you can display that reply like a comment underneath your post. This is pretty common for out-of-the-box Webmention plugins, like this one for WordPress^[1]. You can see it in action on Liz's WordPress blog where my reply on this blog shows up as a comment on hers, with my avatar and the original posting date and everything.

Making this work nicely requires a bit of setup on the part of the page that contains the link, though. A computer isn't smart enough to take any old webpage and figure out which parts of it are the author's name, the author's avatar, the text of the reply, and so on. In order for all of that to work nicely, the linking page needs to use h-entry metadata to explicitly indicate all this information. Fair warning: h-entry is unavoidably a bit technical to…

It's really tough for me to read this post which is, to a substantial degree, about the hypothetical of my wife dying. But I think it's worth sharing both as a celebration of the fact that she is very much alive and as a meditation on what life is like with only the ongoing application of modern medical treatment between oneself and the void.

Also, I gotta say, I am pretty proud of that beverage. The flavors meld really well—I wanted to make sure the black sesame was still very much the primary note, which it absolutely is, while giving it a bit of richness with the scotch and cacao as well as a touch of liveliness with the amaretto and absinthe. I might actually seek out more black sesame ice cream to be able to make this for friends.

I have formed the opinion that Silent Hill 2's "health drink" is an unflavored yogurt/raw quinoa smoothie with no other ingredients and I will not be swayed from this

Okay I set up a new comment system! Shouts out to Damien for hosting it. It's definitely better than CommentBox: it's got real formatting, you can change your avatar, and you can link back to your homepage.

The catch is that CommentBox didn't actually include commenter emails in its data export, so you won't be able to update your old comments by default. If you want to do so, send me an email at ask@nex-3.com with a link to one of your old comments and I'll manually reset the email associated with that account so you can go through the password recovery flow.

The process of building out this site has inevitably involved design choices about how to engage with various technologies and other people's web presences. It's a truism that you can't solve social problems with technology, but social media has made it just as clear that technology does shape the social dynamics that emerge in the spaces it mediates. This drives me to wonder: as more of my friends and friends-of-friends move to individual websites and blogs, what social dynamics does this give rise to? And what different technical designs could improve those dynamics?

I think it's most interesting to approach this question from the social direction rather than the technological. Our first priority should be a set of social goals for interacting on the internet, and only with that understanding firmly in hand can we start usefully interrogating the way technology gives rise to or fights against the sort of interactions we want. My ultimate aim is to articulate a clear vision of a way to interact with people's websites that's not just a pastime or a research process, but that can meet social needs—to imagine what I'll call a "sociable web".

Sociable Web not Social Network

I'm using the term "sociable web" as a conscious contrast to "social network". Social networks have unavoidably shaped our understanding of what form of socialization is possible online, and I don't even think it's always been for the worse. But now they are fragmenting and rotting, and whatever was good about them—their casual usability, the massive network effect of "all your friends are here"—is falling away like so much decayed flesh. I want to envision something new, and when doing so I often find that a new name can help.

"Web" versus "Network"

I'm not interested in a "network" in the sense either of a single company overseeing many users or a decentralized collection of nodes like the Fediverse that is nevertheless tightly coupled technologically. I don't think either of these forms are sustainable in a capitalist world. They are either fed by boundless venture capital coffers which inevitably move to capitalize their userbase, or they're built on the backs of massive amounts of unpaid labor and poorly-understood power structures. The exploitative conditions under which these networks are produced run downstream and affect their social dynamics.

I'm interested in a social form that uses as its foundation the web itself. Where anyone can participate just by having a website. Where the existing networks are, to some degree, part of that form already simply by virtue of being accessible over HTTPS.

"Sociable" versus "Social"

"Social" is unopinionated. "Social" is throwing a bunch of people into a room and seeing what happens. A party can be social, but so can a witch hunt. "Social" is thinking about the technology as primary and allowing the social dynamics to fall out from that. When things are built to be merely "social", they force the real humans who use them into chaotic interactions both healthy and harmful, a…

I'll make a more thorough post about this at some point, but the short answer is that all you really need to do is tell my Webmention receiver the URL to your post and the URL to the post it's reblogging. You can do that manually by pasting the link to your post in the little webmention form beneath each of mine, or automatically by hooking up your blog's RSS feed to webmention.app.

The only bit of markup that can help here is adding either class="u-repost-of" or class="u-in-reply-to"^[1] on your post to indicate what it's reposting or replying to. Use u-repost-of if it's just a plain repost without any additions, and u-in-reply-to if you're adding any additional content. You can put these on:

• A simple <a> tag whose href is my post.
• The root element of an h-cite that provides more metadata about my post.
• The root element of an h-entry fully embeds my post in your blog. (This is technically non-standard but it's what I do and it seems to work with everything I've tested.)

I've set up my site so that it hides Webmention likes and reposts, but displays replies as comments below the post. See this post for an example of that in action.

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1. Technically you can also do class="u-like-of" to indicate a like but that's not something that makes a lot of sense in a static site context. ↩︎

claiming the third of the three slots. I'm Natalie

once again buying way more stickers than I have places to put stickers, even given that I keep layering them on my water bottle like sedimentary deposits

there's an article on these (in Vietnamese), with more photos of La Quốc Bảo's work