With so many site visitors and reactions on Mastodon (LOL), I decided to try out webmentions.

I’m using webmention.io to receive and send webmentions. I’m also using bridgy to combine that with reactions/replies from Mastodon.

The first time I’ve heard about webmentions, was when I stumbled upon Robb Knight’s article. Robb’s website is beautiful and encouraged me to read more about webmentions and actually implement them on my website.

What are webmentions?#

  • Webmentions are a form of web communication that allow one website to notify another about mentions or links to its content.
  • They are a modern alternative to traditional trackback and pingback systems and provide a way for one website to notify another that it has linked to its content.
  • Webmentions are a key part of the IndieWeb movement, which aims to give individuals more control over their online identity and data.
  • In practice, webmentions work by sending a request from the linking website to the target website with information about the link, such as the URL of the linking page and the URL of the linked page.
  • The receiving website can then use this information to display a notification or summary of the mention on its site.
  • Webmentions offer a more open and decentralized way of communicating between websites and can help to foster a more connected and engaged web.

Future plans for webmentions on lubieniebieski.pl#

Of course, the first paragraph was a bit of a joke, with 2 reactions on Mastodon, there’s not a lot of incentive to spend a lot of time on webmentions here. However, I believe that eventually, I’d would be great to connect the content here with other places on the web, to spark discussions, to get more feedback, to cross-link content when it makes sense.

For now, there’s not even a div for webmentions on the site, but the “backend” is already working.

How to implement webmentions?#

Have a look at following sites, I think they are a great starting point and were enough for me to get webmentions working here: