Sometimes it’s the little things, like editing a post. Edit a reply, see a comment update on another post.
From day 5 (https://tantek.com/2023/005/t3/indieweb-simpler-approach)
* Can I edit my post after publishing?
Whether a tweet or Instagram photo, the answer is no.^1
Blogs and websites have had editing capabilities since the start.
However, no site is an island, it’s a *web* site. Interlinked.
We expect edits on one site to show up when embedded or syndicated on other sites.
#Webmention provides the ability for cross-site comments, and unlike the "one-off" prior protocols of Trackbacks & Pingbacks^2, when you update a cross-site comment, by resending a Webmention, the other post updates its copy of your reply: https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/#sending-webmentions-for-updated-posts
If you delete a reply, by resending a Webmention, the other post can delete its copy (or mark it as deleted) https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/#sending-webmentions-for-deleted-posts
Similarly, the #ActivityPub protocol specifies update & delete capabilities, as implemented by #Mastodon and others.
#BridgyFed (https://fed.brid.gy) bridges (as the name says) these two protocols, which enables the following interactions.
#IndieWeb post -(Webmention)-> BridgyFed -(ActivityPub)-> Mastodon displays post
and then this:
IndieWeb updated post -(Webmention)-> BridgyFed -(ActivityPub)-> Mastodon displays updated post
This works for replies to toots as well:
IndieWeb reply to toot -(Webmention)-> BridgyFed -(ActivityPub)-> toot displays reply
and subsequently:
IndieWeb updated reply -(Webmention)-> BridgyFed -(ActivityPub)-> toot updates display of reply
Thanks to these update protocols in Webmention & ActivityPub, and BridgyFed connecting them, after adding “forward-in-time” links (https://tantek.com/2023/006/t1/forward-in-time-links) I was able to resend webmentions for my previous #100DaysOfIndieWeb posts, and have those forward links show up wherever my posts were already displayed on Mastodon.
Posts interlinked with replies interlinked with protocols interlinked.
This is day 9 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb #100Days.
← Day 8: https://tantek.com/2023/008/t7/bridgy-indieweb-posse-backfeed
→ Day 10: https://tantek.com/2023/010/t2/build-use-services
^1 The ability to edit tweets has literally been the most requested feature on Twitter since perhaps its launch. Last year, paid Twitter “Blue” accounts finally got the ability to edit tweets, sort of: five times within 30 minutes of posting. Too little, too late.
* https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/03/twitters-edit-button-is-rolling-out-to-blue-subscribers-in-canada-australia-and-new-zealand/
* https://blog.hootsuite.com/can-you-edit-a-tweet/
* https://www.pcmag.com/news/twitters-edit-button-is-coming-soon-for-paid-users
* https://www.macrumors.com/2022/10/06/twitter-edit-tweet-option-united-states/
* https://9to5mac.com/2022/10/06/twitter-rolling-out-edit-button/
^2 Pingbacks were originally (and for many years) only implemented as one-off cross-blog interactions. One-time, uneditable. Pingbacks (and Trackbacks before them) were notoriously ugly when they showed up on blogs, listed & displayed as a separate thing (never tie presentation to the name of a protocol) with cryptically elided summaries: https://indieweb.org/pingback#Poor_display.
Over 10 years after Pingback was specified (2002), the then nascent (founded 2011) IndieWeb community re-used pingbacks for actual comments across sites in 2013: https://tantek.com/2013/113/b1/first-federated-indieweb-comment-thread separating presentation & UI from the protocol.
This separation of concerns approach evolved into the Webmention specification, separating the protocol from the display of comments, likes, reposts, and other social web https://indieweb.org/responses.
https://jhey.dev/ (@jhey@front-end.social) hey! thanks for the kind words.
Two sides to supporting #webmentions:
1. Sending: https://webmention.app/ is excellent, by https://remysharp.com/ (@rem@front-end.social), or you can write your own Webmention sending loop using endpoint discovery libraries, and in that loop you can do other things, like also send each link to the Internet Archive (https://indieweb.org/Internet_Archive#Trigger_an_Archive, what I do on my site) to archive each link as of the time you linked to it.
2. Receiving: https://webmention.io/ (which is what I use) by https://aaronparecki.com/ as recommended by https://mxb.dev/ (@mxbck@front-end.social), or https://webmention.herokuapp.com/ by https://voxpelli.com/ (@voxpelli@mastodon.social) as recommended by https://kryogenix.org/ (@sil@mastodon.social). Similarly to sending, you could also write your own Webmention receiving code.
Then the fun part, once you’re receiving webmentions, is figuring out how you want to display them as comments, likes, reposts etc. on your post permalinks. Do you display people’s icons/avatars, at what resolution? Do you display the entirety of comments or do you elide them at 255 characters (or some other limit)? Etc. If(when) you start storing received webmentions in your own site/server’s storage, there’s a bunch more interesting considerations.
More resources:
* https://indieweb.org/Webmention-developer
That’s a good start. Drop by https://chat.indieweb.org/dev for deep dives into any of the above, and welcome to the Webmentionverse
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