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The entire problem would be solved, mostly, if more sites would support and use webmentions by default. That way we don't need centralized hubs, we don't need to have a gazillion sites polling HN/Reddit/etc either. Just a simple ping from A to B, indicating a link.

Or am I missing something obvious here?

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How would that work on a static site? Would I need to run a (tiny) service that accepts incoming webmentions and then expose those? How do webmentions deal with spam?

We had "pingbacks" back in the day. They were abused by spammers to get backlinks to their vi@gra, rolex, etc websites. My blog got thousands if not more per day of these pingbacks. Has webmentions solved that?

For a static site, you could use a stand-alone server like webmentiond[1]. Seems like that'd integrate similarly to what you're running now, but under your own control. There's also webmention.io[2] if you really don't want to self-host.

As for spam, the flow involves the receiver checking the sender to see if there's actually a link, before the mention is accepted. I think that is more effort than the average spammer is going to put in, although it's not 100%. Then again, neither are comments on somebody else's site.

[1]: https://webmentiond.org/ [2]: https://webmention.io/

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