Webmentions not working

External sites
1

See my original request here:

https://micro.blog/khurtwilliams/21910542

2

I think there are a couple of things going on here. The first thing I noticed is that there were a couple Webmention requests with a blank target parameter. Micro.blog “accepts” those but they are immediately ignored because the parameter is missing. However, I copy/pasted your curl command and it did send the target through correctly.

There’s another issue, though. Replies from Webmentions need to have a u-in-reply-to class on the link back to Micro.blog so that it knows it’s a reply to the post. So where you have:

<a href="https://micro.blog/Denny/21869905">micro.blog</a>

It should look like this:

<a href="https://micro.blog/Denny/21869905" class="u-in-reply-to">micro.blog</a>

I’ll update the documentation to make this more clear. Thanks!

3

I suspected that the missing class=“u-in-reply-to” was the culprit.

Thanks for tackling this @manton . I’m a big proponent of IndieWeb technologies.

4

I’m wondering if crossposting should have a check mark/option to enable the addition of a “source URL” or similar, so that even micro posts that are cross-posted become “eligible” for webmentions?

1 Like
5

That would require the platform it’s cross posted to storing that info and then sending web mentions when someone replies to the copy of that post, wouldn’t it?

6

Maybe? I was thinking about how bridgy only works on long posts (because the URL comes across).

7

Bridgy requires that link to be in the content-- having some meta data sent to Mastodon/Bluesky/Pixelfed/whatever won’t work if that platform can’t store it and Bridgy can’t access it.

8

Ahh I see. To clarify: I was not thinking metadata, but end of the post like:

from: [url]

or something like that.

9

I think a lot of folks would be mad about that because it would dramatically reduce your character count on the cross post for a feature that is not super common.

10

My understanding is that all Webmentions require a source and target. In any case, the issue here is broken Webmention processing on micro.blog. External Webmention replies to micro.blog comments has worked in the past.

11

This does not work. See original blog post : Fediverse Unlocked on Island in the Net by KhĂĽrt Williams

See micro.blog cross-post with comments @khurtwilliams@islandinthenet.com I'm not sure how you will get this reply, though.

WordPress comment is thus:

<a href="https://micro.blog/numericcitizen/26727320" class="u-in-reply-to" rel="nofollow ugc">@numericcitizen</a> if micro.blog’s <a href="https://help.micro.blog/t/replies-and-mentions/28" rel="nofollow ugc">Webmention support</a> is working as expected, then you’ll see this reply in micro.blog itself.
12

I think this may be an issue with threaded replies on WordPress? Here’s what I’m seeing when looking at your blog and the webmention that Micro.blog receives:

  • Your reply is to another reply from @numericcitizen.
  • The u-in-reply-to is correctly set to the URL you’re replying to.
  • But the webmention target is not the same URL. It’s set to the root post.

So when Micro.blog tries to verify that the webmention contains the expected link, the check fails and the webmention is ignored. This seems like a bug in WordPress, not Micro.blog, unless I’m missing something. (It is a lot to unravel.)

13

I’ve also asked this question over in the IndieWeb chat. I think I can work around the issue by crawling the replies to verify the link, but I’d like to know if this is expected behavior first or something that should be fixed in WordPress.

14

This very well may be a bug in either the Webmention plugin. I’ve had some similar issues with sending Webmentions to other websites that have Webmention support.

15

I fixed that bit.

I am using <p class="e-content"><a href="https://micro.blog/Denny/21869905" class="u-in-reply-to" rel="nofollow ugc">@Denny</a></p> but the reply never made it back to micro.blog

The original post is here: Reconsidering Choices: Reflecting on the Lectric XPremium Electric Bike Experience on Island in the Net by KhĂĽrt Williams

16

Just a follow-up. It turns out that the microformat2 markup in my theme was broken. I fixed it over the weekend (to address a different issue) and it seems Webmention are working as expected between my self-hosted WordPress and micro.blog.