I like the idea, but I wonder if I should bother: in other words, are people actually using this? Is this the new pingback, because that seemed like a good idea, too, but it never got off the ground.
My concern here is spam. With hindsight both Pingback and Trackbacks (which Pingback was a response to) essentially became APIs fit spammers to add junk to your site. Can webmention avoid the sane fate?
BTW, there's a pretty good discussion of pingback compared to webmention here, including how to bridge between them and some of the spam problems too https://indieweb.org/pingback
I think Webmention is viable at the moment just because of the low adoption across the web. Just like with pingbacks and trackbacks, any kind of manual moderation becomes infeasible when valid posts get swarmed under thousands of automated spam posts.
The typical verification step (check if the originating site contains a valid link) is trivial to work around. One attempt to address that is Vouch [1], but I believe it's largely untested in the wild.
I've had them on my sites for a few years now, and even with bridgy passing tweet replies through the spam hasn't been too bad, but certainly adding an allow-list makes sense too. Having built Technorati that effectively did this at scale, I do appreciate the spam problem, but decentralising implementations has so far worked out OK.
I gave up and stopped using it (well, I didn't bother reimplementing it on one of my various blog engine rewrites).
If I were to implement pingback or webmention today I'd use a moderation queue with the ability to allow-list trusted domains so they get to skip moderation in the future.
I've implemented WebMentions in a project that uses it as a push notification system for websites that integrate our widget (which is just a <script> tag they include on their page). That kinda works: if you integrate the widget, you know you can expect WebMentions from https://plaudit.pub, and thus add it to an explicit allowlist.
Most POST spam is repetitive. It's very rare human POSTs are. If you filter out any POSTs that happen identically more than 3 times you remove most spam. It's not perfect but it makes it manageable. Of course this is a lot easier to implement if you batch process.
I’ve seen it on a number of blogs. Below a blog post, it shows who linked to it. Anyone who finishes reading the post can look at these responses, read them, follow them to their source. Does that qualify as “using this”?
Sure. What I meant was, of course both pingback and webmention are being used, but they did not give rise to the kind of decentralized conversation that I hoped they would when I learned about them. Instead we got Twitter. But I still think this is what people should be doing. I suppose I’m asking, should I use both pingback and webmention? Or just the latter? Does this replace pingback, or should I implement both?
My concern here is spam. With hindsight both Pingback and Trackbacks (which Pingback was a response to) essentially became APIs fit spammers to add junk to your site. Can webmention avoid the sane fate?