microformats

I've set up my website to be properly(?) tagged for microformats. I get to put another post under my good friend the tags devlog & changelog, and you... can't really see a difference. Unless you drop a post link on another service, maybe?

Hopefully what I did will:

1. make embeds prettier elsewhere
2. allow me to take advantage of webmentioning websites whose authors have configured them to recieve webmentions
3. put me in a place where I understand webmentions enough to also recieve them eventually??

This whole indieweb microformat/webmention snarl has been a huge twist in my brain for a while--starting with Natalie's intro to it and post on how she uses it for reposts quite a while back and then moving to azhdarchid's recent move to 11ty which led to webmentions and his link to [Reilly's really rather helpful guide](https://reillyspitzfaden.com/wiki/tutorials/webmention-tutorial/#sending-webmentions-(command-line), I've been slowly picking apart what I do inderstand and don't understand and what to do to get towards what I want to see.^[1] I gotta say, I'm not very impressed with the effort involved to get this working.

I think my main issue is just how poorly documented it all is! I kept having questions on what class tags are available for microformat and under which root (I think they're also called vocabularies??) they can be used under and whether they're mandatory or not and ran dry against microformats.org and its awful wiki. The MDN has some nice examples and how they should parse out when read, but none of the base info I was after--and they tend to use a lot of short hand examples of stacking multiple classes, but I have yet to find anything that spells out the rules for that in a way I could use to do anything efficiently. I think a massive improvement over what I saw would be a diagram showing how things are expected to nest, abstracted one degree from html so it was only looking at the expected classes. I'm a big fan of "if it's not there make it yourself" but I'm not convinced what I have is any sense of best practice--I'm just glad it parses according to the checks I've run!

I'm less frustrated that there's this much setup and more frustrated that the setup is so unclear--since webmentions live and die on both sides taking effort to make things work, you'd think there would be some less opaque resources out there. I think this must be why there are so many blog posts around on how to do this, to varying degrees of clarity: people want others to set up webmentions to allow for the most robust social website experience, and the root docs are so bad you can't expect anyone to use them! I didn't even bother linking all the stuff I read trying to get this to work. The main attributions provided the best info for me.

Now that I have a better handle on this, I'm able to better understand the ways webmention and microformats use each other, which will be nice as I wend my way towards thinking about implementing webmention display on my site. Now that I understand there are microformats that can class a hyperlink to specify whether I'm liking, sharing, or replying to a post, I now feel like I can send people mentions using their forms, which is neat!^[2] If I can get that, I should be able to work towards automatic mentions (via my RSS feed apparently), which in my mind puts me as an actively contributing netizen of the newold internet.^[3]

I think from there I would like to recieve webmentions. I am pretty happy posting into the void, but I do miss having easy interactions. I love a good email/message about my posts, but there's Something Better about having those public if desired--a way to spiral out and yes and and mark something. I think webmentions fail in two particular things I'd like to have, but I think it's a OK compromise, esp if I can figure out how to bridgy comments from bluesky or whatever to further open up who can interact.

Thing one I like is comment chains. Having a back and forth is Nice! it's good to leave a note, and get notified when that is responded to, and then leave another note. That's good interaction. I don't know how that could really be supported by webmentions. You can do a repost chain, but not really Small Socials where everything is under one root post a la social medua--and really, the close-to-small-socials webmention can achieve is only really enabled by stuff like bridgy opening a door to people who are not necessarily inclined to making not just a website but an Extra website with all this Stuff piled in, IMO.

The other thing I like is a low effort ping--a like, a heart, a neat, a yeah, whatever you wanna call it: sometimes you wanna do the internet equivalent of the steering wheel finger wave or nod in public or wave from across the street. You can kinda do that with webmentions via a page you host full of links tagged with the right class, but it requires one to see a post, place the link correctly on your own site, and then manually or automatically notify the other side so they can verify the URL is present and make sure all is good before notifying the liked site. This is probably good for reducing spam, but not good when you're trying to just wave hello. I don't know that I have any sort of solution for this--it needs enough authentication to prove So and So is doing the wave, and so little friction it feels like waving. Social media likes work 'cuz you're already authenticated; you don't wanna have to authenticate to every website ever just to be able to wave. But you should be able to wave!

Even if I can't have the world, I'm happy tho--I finally came out on top of microformat and I think I've got a grasp of how it/webmentions work/work together--something I've been grappling with on and off since I made this site.