I love webmentions. I love the concept of them and I love how they allow for high-quality conversations and sharing.
I’m just sometimes tired of high quality stuff, you know? Sometimes, all I want is to comment on someone’s post to say « lol » or « nice thanks for sharing » or « saaame! » and that’s not something that warrants a whole blog post and entry in my RSS feed.
Every blog without a comment section makes me sad.
Every blog that only allows webmentions makes me sad.
No, I don’t want to email you or send you a webmention to say « hehe this was funny ». Some things are funny, but not « share on my platform » funny. (Also, I’ve had SO MANY webmention bugs recently. I believe webmentions are a technical barrier to entry to the indieweb.)
Conversely… I feel a lack of connection on the indieweb and it sometimes makes me sad.
Because we want every single interaction to be thoughtful and intentional, we don’t interact nearly as much as I wish we did. I don’t believe that creating a community that’s fun and engaging can work if you can’t have fun and easily engage with each other. Then again, that’s not the point of the indieweb at large – it’s just what I, Alex, wish I had.
I’ve been posting a lot of book reviews recently and I’m really *this close* to adding a like button that does absolutely nothing valuable but shows me people care enough to click on a button for me. External validation, baby!
I could not agree more, I am a full-blown linux nerd who jumps at the chance to self-host stuff, but even to me webmentions are a poor substitute for simple comments.
I’m a hypocrite though, I do not have comments on my site to keep things simple, and yet I have found some of my favourite sites through comments on other blogs! Your post made me consider perhaps adding comments again
Haha nice.
Recently, Alex started a conversation about how the Indie Web community does not really give enough space to all the different ways we already know of how to communicate online. And how limiting is can be to only rely on the webmentions.
And I agree with him, that webmentions are a technical barrier – both in how to set them up and use them. Anybody who thinks HTML is not a technical barrier needs to hang up with some non-programming people. Not to mention, there were times, when I sent the webmention, and just got back a non-helpful error response. In these cases, it is hard to figure out if the problem is on my site, let alone solve it.
But also in how their setup of different sites limits what an ‘acceptable’ webmention is. The result being, that I have so far read multiple posts of people complaining that some people are sending the like webmention with the text. Can’t provide the link, since I did not save any – they did seemed a bit misguided?
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