Webmentions best practices

I found several webmentions related discussions on this forum here, here, and here. However, I’m still bit confused on how to best take advantage of them in my own micro.blog hosted blog.

My current theme is a fork of Marfa. Regular micro.blog replies show up after a post just fine, but (with the help of Webmentions), I’d also be interested to see the following use cases work in similar fashion:

  • If I’ve cross-posted my micro.blog entry via my Twitter account → see the comments on that tweet among the replies under that specific post
  • The same behaviour for comments on other cross-posts, for example: Mastadon, Medium and LinkedIn
  • Third, if someone mentions this post in their blog (WordPress based or other), that would also been shown in the replies section for my post

Is some of this functionality baked in already in micro.blog hosted blogs (in themes via conversations.js?) or what would be the best practices in making webmentions work the best?

I’d love to see some examples on how other micro.blog users have implemented this on their blogs, or maybe even a “webmentions & micro.blog for dummies” type of post here on help forum :smiley:

Any good blog posts or videos about the subject, anyone?

Cheers!

Good idea about some kind of guide. I’ve heard that our support for Bridgy may have broken this week… That is what you’ll need to bring teeet replies back into your blog. I’m looking into that.

For replies from those other services, I don’t think there’s a good best practice for that yet.

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Thanks @manton! I’ll need to check Bridgy. Thanks for looking into that issue, if that turns out to be a case.

Twitter & webmentions alone would be great, I wouldn’t really need the others at this point anyway :blush:

Cheers!

I used to have webmentions on my WordPress blog. Now that I’ve switched to micro.blog I feel I miss them! For instance, Colin mentioned a blogpost of me in his blog (handrolled), as did Tracy (WordPress). I sent manual webmentions (see here and here)to see what would happen on my side, but I don’t receive any notification or mention. Is this something that is in the works, done through plugins or better through third party apps like Telegraph?

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Micro.blog receives the webmentions. They’re there. You need I think the conversation.js plugin with a compatible theme to see them.

Thanks for your reply! I checked in the template and I have the conversation.js plugin loaded. When I actually go to https://micro.blog/conversation.js?url=https://frankmeeuwsen.com/2023/12/28/hyperlinks-and-language.html I see the responses loaded. But, when I go to https://micro.blog/conversation.js?url=https://frankmeeuwsen.com/2023/11/28/the-neverending-story.html where I know a webmention was sent to, I don’t see anything loaded. Is there anything I’m missing here?

I took a closer look at that first link on Colin’s blog and it doesn’t have a u-in-reply-to class on the link, so Micro.blog is receiving the webmention but ignoring it. In your experience with WordPress, did it behave differently?

Yeah this is really important to note— a lot of folks do webmentions wrong/not to spec. I get Manton wanting to make it work with these cases best he can, but a lot of complaints about how various indieweb (and activitypub) stuff doesn’t work with Micro.blog comes from bad implementations on the other side.

Ah yes, you are correct. Colin’s link misses this class. With WordPress, to be honest, I am not quite sure how the plugin behaved. It might have been a bit more “relaxing”. When it received a webmention I think it checked for microformats, but it also had some fallbacks to get information from the linked page, like open graph tags and basic metatags. Again, I might be mixing up some WordPress plugins. But the upside was I got quite some surprising links from all over the web that I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. I think that is one of the biggest upsides of webmentions, it grows your network.

If micro.blog had that feature I would instantly use it.

I have tried using Webmention replies to micro.blog comment and it does not work as expected. I don’t think it ever has. And the Help documentation is incorrect.

See the comment section of my post: Fediverse Unlocked on Island in the Net by Khürt Williams