I’ve decided to go all-in with email. I now have a button at the bottom of every post saying, Send Me Email. Everyone has it and knows how to use it.
The main drawback, as I see it, is that email can feel too intimate and possibly intrusive. I usually hesitate before pressing the Send button. Do I really want to have a relationship, however temporary, with this person?
Anyway, I’ll see how it goes.
I’m curious why you write it this way, then?
If all you’re doing is re-creating what a webmention would do then, yes that would be awkward. But that feels like a fumble on what the benefits of email can actually be. It’s not a ping, it’s a conversation.,
Personally, I send emails like:
‘Hey been reading your site and I thought […] was really insightful! [passage about what I thought about the post] I wanted to share it with others, so here’s the blog I linked it in!’
Because you’re sharing it for a reason, so… why not let them know what that reason is, in your email? No different than if I were to make a comment on their blog, because that’s effectively what it is. I just used email to pass it along. To me, that’s what connection, is.
Which, related to that:
I find this confusing, since at the beginning of your post you say:
Did you mean connections in the literal functional sense, one thing connected to the other, or did you mean connection as in connecting to other people.
Because, it is my opinion, that truly connecting with other people requires communication, and that requires some amount of being personable with the other. I, for one, absolutely love that kind of little personable connection.
I’m glad that kind of connection comes easier for you. Maybe I’ll get there one day.
I looked into webmentions a while back. I always learn by doing, so I managed to make it so my website can receive webmentions, if people want to do that. Well, it’s advertised nowhere on my site, and I don’t have any fancy way of displaying the mentions I receive, so I doubt anyone will ever use it.
It sounds interesting in theory, but it’s too confusing for me to properly grasp at my current skill level when it comes to coding and web stuff.
It’s okay if you don’t advertise it - I and many others have set up our publishing pipelines to automatically send out webmentions to any pages linked in one of our pages. (webmention.io makes this really easy to do)
For the reasons I described in the sentence after that one.
It feels like you’re making the case for me here.
They don’t need to be publicly advertised to be found, although that can help to let people know you’re open to them.
I find it interesting that your stance on discussions like this is basically getting mad that something that doesn’t work for you might work for someone else. You’ll happily read personal attacks in people expressing frustration with something you like, and even demand an apology, only to then veer into an actualy personal attack yourself. Whenever I see your posts these days, they come across as unnecessarily hostile towards people who simply don’t see eye-to-eye with you; if that is not your intention, you might want to consider your wording more carefully.
Ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve here. Are you really just sharing an opinion and letting others share theirs in an actual discussion, or are you just trying to beat threads into submission because nobody can differ from you?
I am trying to share opinions in a discussion, which is what I thought we were doing. Now though I’m concerned about how anyone else is going to use this thread for talking about webmentions, unless we can get back on track. Are there any opinions about webmentions that you’d like to share?
Hi all, while I love a good discussion on how confusing IndieWeb.org things are this one looks to be getting a little bit heated for a few of us here and getting a bit defensive over our preferred methods of communication :)
I love the idea of webmentions and have successfully implemented them on my own website and migrating off webmention.io to a self-hosted webmentions endpoint I still don’t feel like they’re used in a way that could be really great for website to website communication.
In a lot of implementations I see they’re used as a proxy for transferring likes, boosts, and comments from Mastodon or other socials. My view is this really diminishes what the value could be.
Think about all the RE: blog posts you see around these days. If webmentions were involved, you’d start seeing a neat conversation being played out over webmentions. Something like how it is described in this A List Apart article, Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet – A List Apart
Back to my website, while I do support them, I’m just linking a page/post that has responded to my post at the bottom with a hyperlink back to them. They can either send a mention through their automated pipeline, or submit the URL manually with my little form
I also offer multiple ways for people to communicate with me so everyone has options 
This is an interesting take on privacy:
“When someone likes or comments on a post on another platform, they aren’t necessarily expecting for their name and profile picture to appear elsewhere. When someone interacts with a post it isn’t them giving consent to have their name and image shown on my site.”
Yes - this is a big thing on Webmentions and syndicating from the social platforms where any particular user may not have any idea what a Webmention is or that their message, and avatar are going to be republished on a website somewhere.
At least when on webmaster has gone through the effort of setting them up, and responding to another webmention enabled website - they know what they’re in for.
I just added them to my site, and it took a lot of work to get them set up, but they are kinda fun. I think I’m liking them?
More power to you, then.
