In an effort to further complicate this site with no content, I added a way to submit comments—or at least kind of. More specifically, I added webmention support.

Full disclosure: I just learned about this concept this morning. I am absolutely not an expert on this topic.

If I am understanding this correctly, it appears that most users resort to using a bridge to connect to Bluesky or other social platforms to create a proxy for comments. A major motivation for making this site was to distance myself from social media. As such, I'm not sure if I'm going to be making full use of this functionality any time soon.

I am currently using webmention.io to do this. If this ends up being a worthwhile venture, I will likely put the effort into making a self-hosted solution to this. I would like to make this site as future-proof as possible, and relying on third-party architecture seems counterintuitive.

Thanks to Shen and his sources [1, 2, 3, 4] for bringing this to my attention. I have attempted to send each of them a webmention with this post. At the time of writing, I have no idea if this is going to work. I apologize in advance if I have inadvertantly spammed their pages.

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Edit Oct 5, 2026 12:55am:

I have already discovered a fundamental misunstanding with how this process works.

It appears webmention.io only collections mentions sent to my site. It does not send notification to other sites when I mention them. I did notify them manually using this site, but it looks like it just sent a blank message. Whoops.

If you're reading this post because I spammed your site: my bad.

I'm going to call it a night for this and try this again when I am not exhausted.

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Edit Oct 6, 2026 2:05am:

As I have been doing more research on this topic, I am understanding why webmentions never got widespread adoption.

I was able to use Aaron Parecki's post as an example to learn how to properly format an out-going webmention that includes context, like this:

A few considerations that I am going to have to take moving forward:

• It appears webmention.app doesn't allow for same-domain replies. If I want to reply to a webmention on my site, I would have to use a seperate domain. This strengthens the argument for doing this without a third-party app (or possibly bridging Bluesky or Reddit).
• I can only send one webmention per recieving domain per page. A back-and-forth discussion would require an entirely seperate page for each response. I am unsure if this is a limitation of webmention.app, webmention.io, or the protocol itself.
• Any styling or modification to the content of the webmention gets ignored. The entirety of the content is flattened into one line of plaintext. Again, I'm unsure what is imposing this limitation.

As I have been researching this, I've seen a variety of ways other people have circumvented these issues. I have to do some tinkering to figure out what implementation will work best for me.

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Edit Oct 8, 2026 12:20pm:

I have made some decent progress on improving my process for using these. I made a JS widget to generate the HTML for the webmention and a curl command to send it. I can just paste the HTML into my site like so:

I decided to just switch to curl for sending, as I use lunix and pasting a command into the CLI is easier. This also solves the same-domain compatability issue with webmention.app.

I am still not sure how I want to have incoming mentions displayed on my site. I currently have a data-target for each individual post, but no way to display any sent to the index. I have a lot of fiddling to do with webmention.io's script call CSS.

I am also not sure how exactly I want to index stray mentions that aren't part of a blog post. I may make an index widget similar to what I did with my blog RSS.