Webmention improvements on Micro.blog

I rolled out a few Webmention improvements to Micro.blog today:

  • Fixed the permalink for a reply when you aren’t signed in, which was preventing external sites from verifying the link after receiving a Webmention from Micro.blog.
  • Added limited support for accepting replies from external sites that do not have a Micro.blog account. Previously, Micro.blog would discard replies that could not be associated with an existing user. Now, these replies will be included in a thread using the domain name for the author. (Brid.gy replies from Twitter are not supported yet.)
  • Improved replying on Micro.blog to send Webmentions to any external site in the reply chain, not just the root post. This more consistently allows replies to be copied to multiple external blogs that are participating in the conversation.
  • Behind the scenes, for the last few months Micro.blog has been recording all incoming Webmentions, even if they don’t target a specific reply or just can’t be processed yet. This should allow us to add more reply-related features for hosted blogs in the future.

There may still be some quirks to work out with these changes, but I’m happy to finish more of the plumbing around replies on Micro.blog. Getting closer to the IndieWeb vision for how cross-site replies on the web can work.

Manton Reece @manton