Maddy Miller wrote a good essay titled I wish reply articles worked better. As a fellow fan of site-to-site conversations (and not at all a fan of social media), I too wish that reply articles work better and agree with her sentiments entirely. As a partial solution, she implemented Webmentions on her site (may this cross the internet sea as a Webmention). This site has “full” Webmention support and my main project has what what I would describe as partial Webmention support. Of course, the problem with Webmentions is that very few sites support them, so they are of limited utility in a practical sense. I do not have a clear and distinct idea for fixing the “response” problem in a broad sense (beyond small communities of sites/fora and increasing Webmention usage), but I will submit that I like Hypothes.is annotation-based commenting, if not the reliance on a centralized service. I plan to write a NLJ essay in the near future on the subject of finding external links to your site.
Internet Reply Posting
Maddy Miller (madelinemiller.dev)Something that I felt was missing however, was the ability to find actual “reply articles”. Articles written in reply to mine. These generally are my favourite kinds of conversations to see, because it means someone was motivated enough by the topic and/or my writing to actually write an article of their own. In the past, I’ve mostly found these many months later, either by chance, backlink detection systems, or direct contact from the author. I don’t like that it works this way. Not only do I not get to read these replies at the time, but readers who come across my article aren’t aware that these wider discussions are going on.