I LOVE finding sites that support webmentions. For me, it’s an instant subscribe. These are people who are looking to build community on the web in a new way.

The process of “replying” and sending a webmention to a post is still a bit cumbersome. Here are the current steps:

  1. Read an article that I want to respond to
  2. Determine if the article supports webmentions (either they offer a URL box OR you have to view the source to see if they have a webmention endpoint).
  3. Copy the URL
  4. Paste the URL into the “reply box” in something like Quill
  5. Write your reply

It works, but it’s not ideal. Also, the average user is not going to go through the trouble of doing all of this.

“There must be a better way…”

Solution

I am proposing a brower extension that you would authenticate with your micropub endpoint using IndieAuth. Once authenticated, the steps to reply to a post become as followed:

  1. If the site supports webmentions, the plugin will have an active icon
  2. Click the icon to reveal a text box
  3. Type your response and click send

(behind the scenes, the extension posts the reply to your blog and then sends a webmention to the URL you are replying to)

This would greatly reduce the friction of using webmentions for responses to posts and I believe would further the adoption of this technology.

Maybe I will get around to building this someday…

Let me know what you think by sending me a webmention ;)