Webmention for long or short posts
Manu Moreale blogged some more thoughts about webmentions. He points out that there are both technical questions and more philosophical questions around fair use and consent. Setting that aside, I want to comment on this part:
Is this post a comment to his blog post? It obviously isn’t. I am in part replying to a point he made, but I’m also talking about other things. I think it’s reasonable for me to be able to decide if something I wrote is a reply to his post or not.
And ultimately Manu lands here:
I think treating entire posts other people write as comments is wrong. It’s their content, it’s their words, and the right thing to do is to link to their sites.
This is actually why Micro.blog is designed the way it is, with replies stored separately from blog posts. Replies to someone else’s blog post get sent over as a webmention. They are short and designed to be treated like comments. But longer blog posts where you are quoting someone and linking to them do not by default get sent.
Because it’s the web, you can customize this behavior by including in-reply-to in a blog post yourself. Micro.blog will see that and send the webmention for you.
As more platforms support IndieWeb protocols, and maybe provide more options on the receiving side to customize a blog’s comments page, we could expand Micro.blog’s support to send webmentions everywhere. For now, this feels like the right balance to embrace Webmention for the easy wins, with some flexibility if you want to customize how your blog interacts with the social web.
