Last week I went full speed into setting up webmentions on my site. My implementation works around using webmention.io in my site's <head> and Bridgy for sending me webmentions for comments, likes and reposts on my posts that I share.
Ideally I would like to self-host my webmentions endpoint so I am not relying on another service but I haven't found a suitable replacement yet. Maybe I should just self-host webmentions.io as it is open source.
While looking for alternatives I came across this post The Indieweb privacy challenge (Webmentions, silo backfeeds, and the GDPR) by Sebastian Greger. He makes an excellent point when it comes to "silo backfeeds" which in this case is talking about sending webmentions from the Fediverse and Bluesky.
My webmention implementation involved showing names and avatars for all the people who liked, reposted or commented on my content including those from the Fediverse.
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.
Not all webmentions come from Brid.gy, others are sent directly to me from another website that also supports webmentions. This is where I believe you can say consent has been given.
This isn't me pulling information from elsewhere and sending it to my website. This is them choosing to send me a webmention to let me know they have mentioned me or commented on one of my posts.
I still however like to show when people have interacted with my site or continued the conversation on elsewhere.
So I have implemented a compromise.
For likes and reposts I now just show the count received no matter the source. Comments from the Fediverse are just shown as counts with a link back to my parent post.
Only when I receive a reply or a mention from another website that supports microformats, is it shown on my website.
I think this reaches the right balance between maintaining peoples privacy and still having that social aspect that makes the indie web so great.
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