⚹ Webmention

265 2026-07-28 bookmark ♈ ☿

A W3C Recommendation: a site that links to a URL POSTs its own URL to that target's webmention endpoint, the target fetches the source back to confirm the link is valid, and a decentralized backlink exists across two domains that share no database.

It's a simplified successor to Pingback, form-encoded instead of XML-RPC.

Where Eleventy InterlinkerObsidian-style wikilinks, backlinks, and embeds for Eleventy. Used for both dead-link reporting and stub-generation. The resolvingFns is why I use this instead of the lighter eleventy-plugin-backlinks alternative. It makes the hover-preview excerpts on wikilinks possible. The dead-link-to-stub pipeline is the… resolves backlinks at build time within one flat corpus of files, Webmention does the same job across the open web, between sites nobody but their owners control. FoamFoam is a VSCode extension for markdown-based personal knowledge bases: wikilinks, backlinks panel, graph visualization, orphan and placeholder panels. Read from the same flat src/notes/.md files this site already builds from. No server, no separate app, just an editor plugin…'s graph view and this site's own backlinks panel are the closed-world version of what Webmention does open-world.

It's the technical backbone of POSSEPublish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere: Post to a domain you control first, then push copies to whatever silos your readers already use, each copy pointing back at the canonical original. The IndieWeb wiki frames it against PESOS, publishing…. Syndicate a copy to a silo, and a Webmention-aware receiver on your own site can pull replies and likes back from that copy into a comments section you own.

Not yet implemented on this site.