[avian]

> We also have webmentions, so, if bloggers start using it, it will help us find other's blogs.

My informal research [1] shows approximately zero adoption of webmention. For 44 blog posts I have written in the past two years, I did not have a single external link to a host that would support it.

[1] https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2020/01/checking...

[njkleiner]

Not quite true, Webmentions are used extensively by the IndieWeb[0] community (which is where the Webmention spec was born).

It's unfortunate that the author linked to the Wikipedia page instead of the Webmention page on IndieWeb wiki[1], which I'd argue is the canonical point of reference, since it has a lot more information and various examples.

It's arguably a niche feature used by a niche community, but it doesn't have to stay that way! Adding Webmention support to your website is actually quite easy since there are free hosted services[2] that let you receive Webmentions to any URL on your (static) site without having to run any code yourself.

[0]: https://indieweb.org [1]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention [2]: https://webmention.io

[rcarmo]

Webmentions, pingbacks and the like were often abused for link spam. I disabled all of that on my blog ages ago (and I had to implement it in the first place, so... that was a drag).

[onli]

Webmentions don't exist for that long. It's unlikely you had to disable them ages ago. But they are basically trackbacks and it's easy to conflate them.

That's also something I should repeat. As someone involved in an active blog engine project for many years now, webmentions annoyed me. They seemingly ignored that trackbacks existed and had already solved the issues webmentions now solve again. They should have been compatible, an extension ideally, but they are not. The project was not even interested enough to host a trackback/webmention converter, which would have given them an enormous adoption boost. Signals to me a complete disinterest of the "indie web" to integrate with the actually already existing independent and open web. I don't get it, it's a shame.

[njkleiner]

They were never really supposed to be interoperable with pingback from what I can tell, see the reasons here[0].

You're right in the sense that it's a classic case of <insert XKCD standards comic here>, but FYI there is a pingback to Webmention converter now[1].

[0]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention-faq#Why_webmention_instead_o... [1]: https://webmention.io/#forwarding

[onli]

Pingbacks I understood, xmlrpc was a mistake. Trackbacks on the other hand... That's the FAQ that annoyed me the most (just didn't see it again when writing the comment above), as if trackbacks had no link verification in modern blogging engines.

It's great that the pingback conversion exists now, one issue less :)