The Flaw In Webmention

One of my trepidations about turning on not just webmentions themselves but also their display on posts is that I don’t actually like likes as a concept, despite once upon a time mentioning how useful they are if and when I’m cognitively overwhelmed but want to send some sort of appreciative signal.

I’d rather only display responses to my posts, but some people use webmention likes to write replies, which confuses the matter—needlessly so, I’d argue—and it’s causing me some degree of anxiety as I prepare to throw all these switches.

This feels to me like a sort of fundamental flaw in how webmentions have been conceived and how they are executed. Why are likes implemented in ways that also allow them to be replies? Replies should be replies and likes should be likes, and if you want to do both then webmention should require doing so separately, each as an individual thing. It’d be fine if a given implementation’s interface allowed you to mark the webmention you’re sending as both types, I’d just like some way of filtering out likes without losing replies

(To be fair, I’ve no idea if the W3C spec itself even takes a position on this.)

Then I’d have a way to exclude displaying the low-information noise while displaying the higher-information signal. I don’t mind knowing that someone liked a post of mine, and it makes sense if the person who sent it wants to dispay that on their site, but I don’t feel the need to advertise that they did so on mine.

Someone having thoughts about a post I’ve written is a thing I’m interested in promoting on that post. Someone simply liking the post is a thing I’m not especially interested in linking in return. It just feels like clutter.