Brandon Kelly

In February, right as I was working to launch this site, this post by Bill Hunt crossed my timeline:

Folks keep talking about decentralization away from mainstream platforms but a reminder that the Fediverse is still nothing more than a collection of instances each subject to a (hopefully) benevolent dictator.

As one of those dictators, I would strongly encourage folks to start looking at TRUE decentralization away from the unscalable ActivityPub protocol and towards the more reliable IndieWeb world of RSS+Webmentions, etc.

Being generally annoyed at the state of social media (part of the reason I decided to have a blog again), I found that a little inspiring.

I had a rough idea of what Webmentions are – basically a more modern version of trackbacks/pingbacks. But I’d never looked into them before, or knew what was involved to get them working.

Webmentions are designed to be nice and simple from an authoring perspective. You link to something, and if that something is accepting Webmentions, it will magically end up displaying your post in a comments/mentions section.

All of the grunt work is done automatically behind the scenes: your CMS scans your content for links and sends out requests to their Webmention Endpoints; their CMS receives the Webmention, validates it, and stores some info about your post and its author (you).

So while it’s simple for authors, there’s a fair bit of work needed to get a CMS to fully support Webmentions. Especially when you factor in how messy (other people’s) HTML can be!

Thankfully, there’s a Craft plugin for that: Webmention by Matthias Ott. The only problem was, it was written for Craft 2, and hadn’t been updated for v3+. No big deal, I happen to know a thing or two about updating plugins. So I got to work on that.

Once the port was ready, I handed it over to Matthias, and he immediately ran with it. We’ve continued collaborating on it since, introducing a few stability and performance improvements.

A couple weeks ago, I finally got around to actually adding Webmentions to this site, including integrating with Brid.gy, a service that sends Webmentions for social media interactions. When I post to Mastodon/Bluesky with a link to this site, Brid.gy will watch for any likes/replies to that post, and pass those interactions off as Webmentions to the linked URL. Pretty neat.