A Webmention enables enables cross-site conversations. Letting site A know that site B is mentioning them (be it via link, a like, a re-post... there are many times of mentions).
One of the cool use cases is to link your Fediverse account (Mastodon, in my case) with your blog. So every time you share a link from your blog and people react to it, these reactions (comments, or likes) will show up as native comments in WordPress. Pretty cool, huh ? 😁
Requirement: Enable pingbacks
There are 2 things you should enable in Settings > Discussion
- Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the post
- Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new posts
Otherwise even if webmentions hit your site, you wouldn't see them.
Requirement: Install the Webmention plugin
Requirement: Bridgy
This free service is used to ping your site when, in my case my Mastodon account, makes a post linking to one of my articles. The likes and mentions from that initial post on Mastodon will be pinged back to my WordPress site.
Requirement: Install Semantic-Linkbacks
It modifies the way your comments are printed, adding the mentions, likes in a nice way. It includes CSS and JS for these rich features.
Conclusion
It might need a little tweaking to show the comments to your liking, if the out of the box doesn't please you. A part from that, quite straightforward.
@ricard Great article, I will try your solution, thanks 👍
@m0bi13 All thanks to the plugin authors Thank you for boosting!
@ricard Of course, Matthias is doing a great job with #ActivityPub and #IndieWeb in #WordPressJust like the BridgyTeam with IndieWeb, which I used in the #Known days and will now return to 🙂
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I had to update the blog post, turns out you need not 1 but 2 plugins to fully enjoy the Webmention experience 😎
@ricard Thanks!So, this would mean that I, on Mastodon, might follow your blog. And my Mastodon interactions will show up in the comments section on the blog?That’s pretty cool.Does it work the other way too? Can someone react / respond to a comment I made that showed up on the blog and send me a masto-notification?
@colo_lee
1. Not sure about follow, I just post new posts manually
2. I don’t think it works the other way around. https://brid.gy is just from Mastodon to WordPress
@chriscoyier The centralized hub of the conversations happening elsewhere (like here on Mastodon) but shown on the blog (and stored there) is already doable 😁Here’s my small blog post about it, I have it working on two of my blogs without issues 😎 The only downside is that you need a third-party to complete the circle➡️ https://ricard.dev/how-to-add-web-mentions-to-your-wordpress-site/
How to add web mentions to your WordPress site – Ricard Torres dev
@ricard Thanks for this. I realize you were answering Chris but I didn’t realize I needed Bridgy!
@cr0ybot Yeah that’s the key, really.I wish there was a way to host that on GitHub Actions or similar, to not depend on Bridgy