Can anyone explain to me if there is a difference between webmentions and pingbacks? It feels the same to me. Old technology, new funky name.

@frank If I recall correctly, pingbacks could be sent without verifying that the original actually existed on a web page which made them easy to spoof and thus a vector for spam. Also they didn't have an easy/useful mechanism for displaying on the receiving site, so typically they look dreadful and aren't very user friendly.

@frank Webmentions are an extra generation or two beyond the traditional pingbacks/trackbacks. The receiver actually verifies that the sender is displaying the permalink on a physical page before accepting it, thereby cutting down on spam (there have been no reports of webmention spam in the wild yet.) Webmentions and their structure are also set up to allow the receiving site to better handle display which often includes the name, avatar, and either excerpts, or complete comment. I use them in WordPress and there's generally little if any difference in the display of Webmention replies and comments natively put into the system manually. Webmention also allows additonal types of mentions including likes, bookmarks, reads, listens, etc. to distinguish for context.

@frank If it's easier think of Webmentions as @mentions the way they're used in Twitter, Facebook, etc., the primary differences being that they work across platforms and instead of using the username as the key, they're using permalink URLs.

@c thanks for the elaborate answer. Very interesting. Since Wordpress still supports pingbacks in it’s backend do you think Webmentions will take over because of the reason you give (security, display, multiple sources) or will they live side by side?

@frank WordPress is notorious for it's backwards compatibility, so I don't suppose pingbacks or trackbacks will disappear any time soon. Interestingly one of the people who commits to the WordPress Webmention plugin oversees the modules for pingbacks/trackbacks. I'm personally hoping that WP puts webmentions into core sooner than later, but it may be a while. There are a few core committers to WP that are aware of it and use it though. If it does go in, they'll all live side by side, though code in the Webmentions plugin does do some work to help make pingbacks look better/work more like webmentions as I recall, so there shouldn't be duplication of content based on the separate specs.