[themadryaner]

There's been a big push to develop modern standards in the IndieWeb community [0]. There are two important standards:

- WebMention, a W3C standard that is basically the equivalent of @ing someone on Twitter [1]. It is simply an http request to a discoverable endpoint with two pieces of data: the webpage being mentioned, and the webpage mentioning it. WordPress had a similar standard called Pingback and websites supporting WebMention often support both for backwards compatibility. - microformats2, an ad-hoc standard for adding metadata to webpages, meant especially for providing metadata for web mentions [2]. For instance, you can specify that the mention is a "like", "reply", or "reblog", and set the author name and avatar.

Independent websites that add support for this can then parse the WebMention to create a comment section and like counter and readers can follow the links to other blogs that talk about the blog post they just read. There are a decent number of personal sites that already support this, like those mentioned in [3]. With enough adapters, it might build the network effects necessary to become a viable social media alternative. Right now though, those in the network are predominantly tech oriented since there isn't a ton of third party support.

[0]: https://indieweb.org/ [1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ [2]: http://microformats.org/ [3]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention#IndieWeb_Examples

[sen]

Pingbacks are so helpful if you’re a blogger of any kind. I manage the blog for a family member who’s an author, and the huge a blog to share thoughts with the readers of their books. Pingbacks let’s them see where their blog posts are being discussed, go answer questions, and interact with the community in a really personal way (on top of the comment systems that are also used extensively).

It might’ve lost popularity over the years but it amazed me that there’s still entire micro-communities of authors/fans doing this. Their own little social networks, all self hosted and self managed through blogs and comments/Pingbacks.