@colinwalker Indeed :) Unlisted posts may be the only way to truely "own" all of your content across the web without overloading your main feed. People subscribe to my blog (I hope?) because they like my writing or are interested in what I'm writing about – they probably don't want to the "listen" to every conversation I'm having on the web. Unlisted posts seems to be the only way to do that (though I Imagine they'd still get spidered eventually).
@jamesvandyne I can appreciate it more when you put it like that. Replies are definitely underused on my blog and I think I've only ever used them in a context that is consistent with other posts so never really considered they might not be wanted.
It's a strange situation as following a feed means you get everything (unless it's something like a category feed) whether it interests you or not and, sometimes, getting those items you might not normally think you'd be interested in can take you on wild flights of discovery.
In any event, I need to reconsider how my likes and replies work so that I can better separate the webmention from the content.