I don't understand how WebMentions are supposed to work between two self-hosted microblogs that are integrated with micro.blog. If I want to reply to a self-hosted post appearing on micro.blog, do I send a WebMention to the micro.blog conversation, the self-hosted post, or both?

@jd are you replying from the self–hosted blog or micro.blog?

@cn Trying to reply from the self-hosted blog, so unclear whether I need to Webmention micro.blog, the self-hosted destination blog, or both, or if it's not meant to work that way.

@jd I have had this discussion with myself, too. What I settled on is that if I see a post that I wish to reply to on micro.blog, and I don't feel like the reply merrits its own post on my blog, I just reply directly through micro.blog. IF however I want my reply to be preserved as a post on my own domain I create a reply post on my website. IF the thing being replied to orginiated on someone's personal blog I send the webmention there, elsewise, I send it to their micro.blog account.

...not certain if that is the best approach, but so far it has been working well for me.

@cn It's weird since micro.blog (by design) mixes a given users' micro.blog-native posts with their self-hosted posts.

So, if you only Webmention the place a post originated from, only micro.blog-native posts would receive micro.blog Webmentions; replies to a self-hosted blog presumably wouldn't show up on micro.blog even though the (self-hosted) post you're replying to DID show up there.

Words are hard, hoping this expresses my confusion. Not sure what the right thing to do is.

My end goal is, regardless of where a post originated from, if it appears on micro.blog, I'd like my self-hosted reply to it to appear on micro.blog, too.

@manton

@eli Thanks for the explanation.

IF the thing being replied to orginiated on someone's personal blog I send the webmention there, elsewise, I send it to their micro.blog account.

So that means, their personal blog post would show up on micro.blog, but your reply to it wouldn't. Maybe that's by design and how Webmentions are supposed to work, but I guess I don't fully understand the model.

@jd at definitely.cn/content/a... is a reply to the post on your Jekyll blog.

That probably didn’t get here because of which RSS feed(s) are configured

@jd nope, becuase EVERYTHING posted to my personal website goes through RSS, my reply would appear as a new post on m.b (I don't have a great example handy, but here is a reply post to something else, not on m.b)

@cn That's related but slightly different, since my blog doesn't currently process Webmentions (as you correctly assumed in your test post.)

My self-hosted reply posts don't show up on Micro.blog since I'm explicitly filtering them out of my blog's JSON feed, and thus expect them to show up on micro.blog as Webmentions instead, as previously suggested to me by @manton here.

@jd hmmm, that is a very good point...I guess I send so few replies to other micro.blog users from my website itself that I hadn't ever noticed this. I tend to reply to external websites, rather than m.b users. If someone is on m.b and I'm replying to something of their's that has come accros m.b I tend to reply there. Good to know, thanks to you and @manton for the heads up!

@jd more this sort of thing? redundant link to reply this is in reply to

@eli As someone new to Indieweb standards, I was just trying to figure out the correct/best/most standards-compliant way to do it while still having a good micro.blog experience.

Wasn't sure if there was an obvious "right" way it's intended to work that I was missing, but sure doesn't seem like it. 🤣Thanks for sharing your workflow, though.

@jd yeah, while the indieweb very much likes technical standards, and while it seems to abide by an unspoken social standard, there isn't a clear standard use-case laid out anywhere!

@cn Yeah! If I understand correctly, you replied to my micro.blog post from your own blog and it showed up in both places, exactly what I was after.

Looks like your reply was delivered to micro.blog via feed rather than via Webmention? Were Webmentions involved at all?

@jd latest was by feed (probably duplicated since I botched the markdown.

The other likely WM only?

@eli Then that's the biggest problem I see with Indieweb. The standards are pretty simple but if the use-cases aren't, it's going to hinder adoption.

That said, I have nothing but love for all the work folks like @aaronpk have done on the standards. Beign able to do standards-based social networking is a lofty and admirable goal.

@jd @cn @eli This is all theoretical, since I still don’t have Webmention support, but based on what I’ve read, it seems to me that if you want to reply to content on Micro.blog, you should send the Webmention to Micro.blog, which will in turn send a Webmention for your reply back to the originating blog. (paragraph 1, bullets 2 and 5) (And then exclude your reply-post from what you feed M.b, to prevent duplication)

@jd at least the app view does not show it in my feed.

@jd it is in the app Conversation view; it’s too late here to comprehend all the nuances…

@smokey @cn @eli ⚡️Eureka! Bullet 5 solves a giant missing piece.

That leaves one more mystery; when publishing a reply from a Micropub client, there won't be any way to select a given Webmention endpoint (micro.blog's endpoint or the destination blog's endpoint, if that destination blog isn't associated with micro.blog.)

Libraries like send-webmention try to autodiscover the endpoint so they'd never send a mention to micro.blog when replying to a post on a self-hosted blog.

I guess I could always send a blanket Webmention to micro.blog and it would work most of the time for how I'm using it.

@khurt Completely agree, but I hope these are really just growing pains with new applications of new standards. Making something deeply customizable also makes it deeply complicated, but perhaps after enough time passes, there will be out-of-the-box apps with sensible defaults for all of this stuff.