Mastodon should send webmentions to linked sites.

[sivy]

Mastodon should send webmentions to linked sites.

Webmentions are a way to notify sites that they have been linked on a blog or social media. While #1384 is focused on Mastodon processing webmentions from outside, I think that it would be easier and more useful in the short term to have Mastodon attempt to send a webmention to sites that are linked in a toot, with the permalink of the toot.

https://webmention.net/draft/

Mastodon already has code to fetch the site (for generating a card), so parsing the result for a webmention endpoint should be a short step. Sending webmentions documents the process:

The sender MUST fetch the target URL (and follow redirects [FETCH]) and check for an HTTP Link header [RFC5988] with a rel value of "webmention". (Alternate endpoint discovery methods discussed here too)

The sender MUST post x-www-form-urlencoded [HTML5] source and target parameters to the Webmention endpoint, where source is the URL of the sender's page containing a link, and target is the URL of the page being linked to.

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• I searched or browsed the repo’s other issues to ensure this is not a duplicate.

[Gargron]

How many sites support accepting webmentions?

[sivy]

I'm afraid I don't know right now. It's in the W3C standard process (https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/), and there are plugins for wordpress and other platforms.

It might be interesting to just add a metric collection on which sites have been retrieved for cards that have the appropriate headers, before deciding to write the sending code...

[clarfonthey]

Any setting like this should be configurable on a per-instance and per-user level.

[chrisaldrich]

Within the past month it's guestimated that over 1 million webmentions have been sent on the internet. There's not really solid research on how many sites physically send and/or receive them, but as of last June the conservative number was in the range of about 5,000 and the number is increasing rapidly, particularly with platforms like micro.blog (5-10,000 accounts) now supporting them out of the box and CMSs like Drupal (via plugin) and Perch having added them since then. This also doesn't take into account an anecdotally sharp uptick of adoption on WordPress via plugin, most notably by several WordPress core developers.

Mastodon already supports most microformats for webmention to be implemented more easily. #122 and #965

There are already a number of open source tools that might also be bootstrapped for something like this as well: https://indieweb.org/Webmention#Services

[snarfed]

thanks chris! you all can also try out https://fed.brid.gy/ , an opt in service that translates webmentions to ActivityPub/OStatus and vice versa. i’m happy to answer any q’s on the mapping. (and mastodon is the main use case!)

[qubyte]

Webmentions are popular amongst the IndieWeb crowd (myself included, though my blog is very low traffic). Scroll to the bottom of this example (Jeremy Keith's journal) for an example of them being used.

[qubyte]

Ah, also worth noting, Webmention progressed to a w3c recommendation a couple of months back. https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/

[nhoizey]

Webmentions are gaining traction thanks to implementations in plugins for Jekyll, Kirby, Drupal, Wordpress, etc.

It would be awesome being able to receive Webmentions from toots!

[qubyte]

My own blog is hosted on netlify, and their built in form handling is well suited to webmentions (at least until the free limit is hit). Sending is more involved since a webmention endpoint has to be detected (I do this via a hand-rolled cli utility).

[kaushalmodi]

@nhoizey My blog built using Hugo also supports Webmentions. I'm seeing more people adding support for Webmentions in recent past.

[nightpool]

I really like the idea of webmentions in theory, but I feel like in practice people link to blogs for negative reasons as much as positive ones, and would be really surprised/upset if they found out we were telling the author that they were shitting on their post—especially if they thought it was just between them and their followers and didn't want or think the post's author was going to see it

(for example, they had a really petty criticism like "good article but I hate this dude because he reminds me of someone i used to know in 3rd grade" and would be really upset if webmentions meant what they thought was just between them + their followers suddenly shoved in the author's face when they totally didn't mean to)

anyway like I said I really like the idea but I feel like in practice implementing webmentions would be ......... awkward.

[qubyte]

I see what you mean. I suppose this points to making the feature somehow optional, and the complications that brings...

[kaushalmodi]

Odd, this feature shouldn't be implemented so that people can swear behind the original article's author's back? If they want to do that, just don't include the article's link in the same toot where they swear.. problem solved :D

I really think this is a non-issue. The plus is that the author's get motivated seeing they are getting referenced where they didn't expect, and would write more and better.

[qubyte]

That may be the case (and I'd personally be happy with this), but links potentially sending webmentions should not be surprising to a user. Since not all links will have a corresponding webmention receiver, and mastodon hasn't worked this way up to now, there'd be a risk of that.

[npdoty]

FWIW, I think as Gargron is suggesting it, mentions would only be sent on public toots, so if you wanted to insult (or otherwise mention in a discreet way) a blogger to your followers while still linking to them and not having them realize, you could accomplish that through a non-public toot.

Nonetheless, I see how this is a privacy issue, even in the case of public toots. Sending a notification is different from just providing a link. Particularly when searching for a link isn't provided functionality, there is a significant meaningful difference in effective publicity.

I think users understand that @-mentions do include notifications of the mentioned person. Maybe links could be like that too, where if you put "@" before a link, then the target of the link is notified, and if you don't, then it's just a simple link. That would be the difference between replying to a blog post (functionality which I would love to have for my Mastodon account) and just linking to it.