#webmentions #indieWeb

Read part 1 here.

webmention-server Now Open Source

This morning I published my webmention-server on GitHub. As I write this I’m thinking maybe this one should have been my first real Codeberg repo, but I digress. I have been working on it privately using my own Forgejo instance and have been wanting to publish it for a bit. As usual perfect is the enemy of good enough and I had not made it public until today, pushing past the perfectionism.

That being said, part of the reason I wanted to publish this is so that I could move on to something else! I still have a big idea for an indie web stack build on top of Obsidian.md, but that might wait.

From Published to Paused

I published the repo with a small note:

Pausing development on this project for now but I am potentially open to returning to it in the future

I don’t expect any interest in the project since there are better ways to get webmentions on your site without hosting all this stuff on your own, but in case any issues come in, I’m down to try to respond time permitting!

Before I completely stop working on this, I would like to include an example of how this would be used on a personal blog. I am planning to port the code from my blog to a barebones example and add it to this repo, but no promises.

My Webmention Reality

So the reality of me and my blog and webmentions is that as far as I can tell, nobody has webmentioned any of my posts yet 😳. This is reasonable as I have a hard time reaching out to others on the web via social media or otherwise, so this is not really surprising to me. I didn’t build this expecting any real use of it from that perspective, I really just wanted to learn stuff (mission accomplished in that case), but I was hoping at least someone would try

It’s quite possible someone HAS tried to webmention one of my posts, and the way that I’m hosting the server swallowed the request in a way that I have no observability on. I think that is a bit of what they call COPIUM though, as I would expect someone willing to take the time to use this feature might also be inclined to drop a line informing me that it didn’t work. From what I can tell the POST requests are getting through as expected when I test them out so I am pretty sure nobody has used it.

update: So if you scroll down on this page you will see that there is in fact a reply from gRegor Love! I need to do a better job of parsing out and displaying the reply, but it is there 😊. This was not without some bugfixes. I had some issues that this webmention from gRegor helped me fix some a few things that were broken, so thanks!

Another Project

I wouldn’t necessarily consider the webmention-server project abandoned, but I think I got what I wanted out of it. Next I would like to explore some of the ActivityPub ways to add comments to my blog instead, as the barrier to entry is a lot lower than setting up webmentions. I will probably keep the server up for my blog for awhile so if you’re webmentions are failing to reach me, please let me know 😊.