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…

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…

Solid chance this is my last selfie to go out on "social media" as such, and so I hope you'll forgive a bit of nostalgia. Posting selfies, especially early in transition, was hugely important for me. For most of my life up to that point I had regarded my looks with suspicion if not outright hostility, and the selfie became the medium through which I began to take ownership of my appearance and develop a sense of style. The first time I looked at a picture I'd taken of myself and realized "oh. I'm hot" was a huge milestone for me.

Posting selfies to social media was an inseparable part of this. As my style became something I actively put effort and care into, having people appreciate it became a reminder that that work was doing something. It wasn't the dreaded numbers, it was the people: people whose taste and style I also saw and appreciated, people who I was friends with and people I just saw around.

When COVID began, I went from taking and posting selfies almost on a weekly basis to nearly not taking them at all. I no longer felt I had any reason to dress up. Wearing lipstick felt foolish when it would just get ruined by a mask. I wasn't getting any new clothes, because I hate having to remember to send back online orders I don't like. My trademark blue hair was growing out, because even after the vaccine made it feasible to be masked indoors with strangers I couldn't bear the pain of trying to find a salon that still required them. I didn't realize until my roots had overtaken me how much the blue had become a part of my self-image, how much it hurt to look in the mirror and not see the self in my heart.

Little by little, I pulled myself out of that hole. Although the pandemic is very much still present and I am very much still taking precautions, I found ways to allow my sense of style to flourish in between those precautions. I'll put on lipstick just because I feel like it. Liz took careful measurements so I could do online shopping with minimal risk of send-backs. Every now and then I'll even strap on a P100 respirator and go to a physical store. I asked around and found a local salon that not only still requires masks, but is queer- and disabled-owned.

And I started taking selfies again. I took selfies to give myself a reason to care about my appearance again. I took selfies as a reward for putting in the work to make myself look and feel good. I took selfies to send to friends, I took selfies to flirt, I took selfies with pals, I took selfies at beaches and forests and birthdays and the precious few weddings that were safe enough for me to attend. I took selfies to remind the world that I existed, and to…

This is a post whose seeds have been bouncing around in my head for years. I always intended to write it up and publish it on Cohost, and so the twilight of that storied website seems like as good a forcing function as any.

In this post, I seek to understand and explain the pervasive phenomenon of COVID denialism from the perspecitve of disability justice, specifically as someone who remains extremely cautious and anticipates doing so indefinitely. It's not intended to excuse this behavior—denialism is actively harmful to everyone the denialist interacts with and fundamentally eugenicist in effect whether or not in intention. But understanding and even empathizing with people who believe falsehoods and do harm can be valuable, especially when they make up such a huge portion of the world and for many of us are inescapably part of our networks and communities.

COVID in the Social Model of Disability

The first crucial thing to understand is that, if you're at least on board with the basic idea that COVID denialism is a pervasive problem, COVID-19 has already disabled you. Even if it didn't give you long-term side effects, even if you're lucky enough never to have caught it, you have been disabled by it. Or to be more precise: you're disabled with respect to COVID-19. The specific agent of your disability is the society that subjects you to snide remarks and outright harassment for wearing a mask, that closes off opportunities for social interaction and employment to you, that makes it impossible for you to exist within it without putting your health at risk.

This is an analysis based on the social model of disability, a major branch of disability theory that emphasizes the way disability is created by a society's failure to provide accommodations for certain bodies and minds rather than intrinsic aspects of those bodies and minds themselves. To use a lightly clichéd example: my severe nearsightedness doesn't function as a disability, because I exist in a society^[1] that accepts it as "normal" and provides easy access to socially unremarkable assistive devices (glasses), or even invisible assistive devices (contacts) if I so choose. But my sleep disorder is a disability—society doesn't consider it "normal" in the same way, and so it's seen as my personal failure and I have to work to make sure it doesn't affect my relationships^[2] or employability.

Using this model, if you exist in a society that has accepted the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19 as normal, the attempt to avoid catching this disease is itself a disability. Society is organized to systematically deny accommodations like mask mandates, sanitizing ventilation^[3], lockdowns and contact tracing, and free access to vaccines, prophylatics, tests, treatments, and protective equipment. Depending on the specific activity and your risk tolerance, public existence while taking reasonable COVID precautions ranges from requiring serious equipment and preparation to being outright impossible. Even if your body isn't any different than it was in 2019, you…

When Cohost goes, with it goes the era of my life I spent on social media. Now that I've tasted the rich fruit of what's possible, I'll never be able to go back wholeheartedly to a site where my timeline is constantly deluged with the latest atrocity, where there's no room for me to write an essay, where I can't even see and share porn. I have loved ones I've followed since before we were even friends whom I won't follow anywhere anymore. It is, inescapably, a paradigm change in how I use the internet.

And in many ways, that's fine. Social media brought me many good things, but even before Cohost I was getting deeply sick of the Twitter model. This is not an intrinsically necessary mode of human interaction, and in a lot of ways it's better not to have it at all than to have it in an unhealthy form.

But. But. There's still a pandemic, deep as world may be in denial, and even with all the mitigations and precautions available it's still an order of magnitude harder to spend time with people in person and another again to enter new spaces and make new friends.

While I've been grieving Cohost, this is something my heart keeps returning to. This was the last great space where I consistently made new human connections. And the way the world is right now, I don't know what can replace that, not just in terms of technology but in terms of life as a whole. The world is so much smaller to me than it was five years ago, and so the loss of a deeply valued space hurts all the more keenly.

RSS^[1] was the original federated social media. RSS invented the "share" verb. RSS is easy, simple, and sustainable. RSS never died.

I'm sure a chunk of you already know what RSS is. Probably some don't. RSS is a protocol (really just a text format) for listing the posts on a website in a machine-readable way. Readers of your website post its RSS feed URL into their feed reader software, this reader periodically checks it for new posts, and it presents all the posts in a single unified list with useful features like "marking stuff as read". (Podcasts still^[2] use the same technology.)

Back in the day, everything had RSS. Any site that had anything that mapped kind of onto "posts", from blogs to webcomics to the nascent social media sites, would expose an RSS feed as well because not to do so was to cut themselves off from what was at the time a massive audience. Even Twitter had RSS for a long time. This was great as a user, because you could easily read stuff from all across the web in a single place. It was great as an author, because your self-hosted blog wasn't intrinsically harder for people to read than anything else anywhere on the internet. It was a kind of federation, but one that didn't require each node to rack up server costs and DevOps time. If you could host a simple XML file that only updated when you made a post, that's all you needed.

If you're reading this, even if you used RSS a bit in its heyday, you may think "oh I can see why that would be useful" but you don't yet understand. All of this is just preamble. What really makes RSS spectacular is the ability to share^[3] posts across feeds. Each post comes with a unique identifier as well as authorship information, which means my feed can just contain a post from my friend that I think my readers would be interested in. It can contain any post from anywhere on the internet! Before Twitter had "retweets" and every website had a "share on social media" button on every page, RSS had post embedding.

Not that most feed readers really took advantage of that, because there wasn't a particularly tight feedback loop between reading and authoring an RSS feed. The one major exception was the late lamented Google Reader, the first high-profile victim of Google's now-infamous penchant for devouring its children. Google Reader provided its own feed for each user, and for a moment there was a vibrant culture^[4] of sharing blog posts with friends and commenting and discussing. I want this back. I want to be able to share anything from anywhere, I want to see the fruits of my friends' excellent taste, and I want to be able to have a conversation about it.

I may not be able to do that yet (although I am hoping this blog can be something like…