Webmentions removed

Back in 2022 I added webmentions to this site – the ability for my posts to send webmentions, and for them to receive webmentions from other sites. I’ve now removed all of that.

I like the general idea but it was, for me, more hassle and complication than it was worth. Even back then I said:

This has all felt like way too much work considering the little benefit I expect to get from it.

If I was writing the kind of posts that contribute to some “discourse” or other then all that automatic interlinking with other people’s posts would have more benefit. But if I ever used to do that, I don’t these days. Consequently I received few real webmentions from elsewhere, and didn’t link to many topical related posts.

I did receive an increasing amount of spam webmentions though, mostly, oddly, to an old post in which I announced I’d re-enabled commenting on posts. For the past few weeks I received a flurry of spam mentions to that post every day at the same time. Given the over-engineering I’d put in, this meant that my watch buzzed several times at 1.15pm to let me know.

On top of all that, I could rarely remember how it all actually worked. If I thought I’d received a real webmention, this happened rarely enough that it took me a while to work out which page of my admin screens to go to in order to look through all the spam so that I could approve it for publication.

It’s all way too much faff, life’s too short, simpler is better. So goodbye webmentions.