@RossGoodman are you by chance using a fragmentions plugin? If you are, the /#comments hash at the end of the URL will cause the targeted element to be highlighted in yellow like that.

Henrik, this is an awesome idea, particularly if feed readers can pick it up inline comments and display them all properly.

I came across this randomly, but am glad to have another example of a microcast to follow and taunt me for not taking the time to make one myself.

@khurtwilliams Kudos for your tenacity! I just saw your notes on my site. The first http://boffosocko.com/2017/10/28/content-bloat-privacy-archives-peter-molnar/#comment-37986 appears to have been sent first as the webmention. The second two (http://boffosocko.com/2017/10/28/content-bloat-privacy-archives-peter-molnar/#comment-37984 and http://boffosocko.com/2017/10/28/content-bloat-privacy-archives-peter-molnar/#comment-37985) appear to have been input manually in the comment section of my site.

I'm guessing you didn't see (or possibly get the webmention--unless you're careful WordPress can often put webmentions into your spam queue) my other reply the other day that explained the issue. You can find it here (http://stream.boffosocko.com/2017/kh%C3%BCrt-ive-figured-it-out-then-id-seen-the-issue or here threaded into the commentary http://boffosocko.com/2017/10/25/your-licenses-frankly-my-dear-cogdogblog/#comment-37780), but I'll also manually syndicate my replies to you as well. Hopefully the explanation will solve your mystery.

By the way, once you fixed the URL on your first original webmention, it did come through and is listed in the Mentions subsection at the bottom of the comments: http://boffosocko.com/2017/10/25/your-licenses-frankly-my-dear-cogdogblog/#comments It shows up as a mention instead of a reply, because the URL that fed through was the raw one (i.e. without a class in the body of your response). If you fix the emoji portion and click save that URL will have a u-in-reply-to which should cause your response to show up and be parsed properly as a reply instead of just a vanilla mention).

If you'd like to discuss the subtleties of any of this in person, feel free to catch me on my phone number on my homepage. :)

@iamJeffPerry Glad you've got something up and running. Let us know if you need comments/interaction to test things out. What's the domain?

@BryanAlexander As I think about it, are my comments/trackbacks stuck in your spam filter?

@BryanAlexander Both your comments made it to my blog! And yes, I'll post my content to my own site & syndicate to yours for completeness.

Jeremy, I think this was a known issue with the WordPress Semantic Linkbacks pluin and thought it got address/fixed in a recent update. If not, do file a bug at https://github.com/pfefferle/wordpress-semantic-linkbacks

Also interesting, it looks like Independent Publisher (theme) isn't outputting a permalink for the comments on Among The Stones either. If they're webmentions, all the URLs point to the locations of of comment originals, which makes it harder to target individual comments with fragmentions.

I'm curious what, if anything, you all think that the IndieWeb as a community could do or do better to make things easier for Generation 2 users?

Additionally is there something we all (as Gen2 users) could band together to do to make it easier for others like us not to have to "suffer" as we did? Comments back to this are welcome, as is conversation in the #indieweb channel, or even brainstorming on the wiki (perhaps the generations page: https://indieweb.org/generations#Generation_2_IndieWeb)

Jack, Your response (above on your site) is a good example of watching what is going on and knowing what your site can and can't do.

Because you put your response directly into the comment box on your site (ostensibly in a general sense to the main post rather than to my response), your site didn't send me a webmention for it and so I didn't know you had responded except that I happened to come back to your post. If you visit it, you'll see that your reply doesn't show up on http://stream.boffosocko.com/2017/i-think-a-lot-of-the-problem-comes-down-to

The better method using Known would have been for you to have clicked the permalink on your site for my comment (the date of my comment or the name of my site) that would have gone to my original, you could then have used the bookmarklet for Known (found at https://stream.baty.net/account/settings/tools/) and used it to quickly reply to my post. You could have optionally added a manual reply field to your original post URL as well and then you'd have received the webmention for it and maintained the entirety of the conversation on that first post.

Because I'm replying to both your post and mine, it should show up via webmention on both. The manual comment box on Known is really only for people whose sites don't support Webmention. Some people actually disable the comment box functionality and only receive Webmentions as a means of preventing spam comments.

In an ideal world, your comment box would send both Webmentions and salmentions to maintain the integrity of the comment thread. Since it doesn't (yet) then you need to do that manually, especially if you want me to see your reply.

Hopefully all this makes some sense...

Here's a photo post of some of the UI that may make it make a bit more sense: http://stream.boffosocko.com/2017/replying-to-multiple-posts-at-the-same-time-to-properly

I think a lot of the problem comes down to all of the siloed walls out there which are causing most of the friction. We're still relatively early days yet and only a tiny few are using the concept of salmention which would help keep running threads working properly. Admittedly having the context live somewhere and then having proper threaded communications isn't easy, so many do what they're able to for the moment.

I'm usually attempting to manually accomplish salmention as best as I'm able, but I may not hit every syndicated target unless you're displaying it directly. Additionally some targets just don't make sense--I'll webmention your original, for example, but this lengthy reply just won't look right at micro.blog if you syndicated a simple headline and URL there, so why bother since you'll see it at the original anyway? Others who are on micro.blog may miss out on part of the conversation, but presumably if they're looking at your copy on micro.blog, they'll be able to see the original as it was intended.

Colin, you mention that not all of your content needs to go to micro.blog. Perhaps, but to think so in my mind is part of the older silo way of thinking. The only reason you're syndicating there is as a stopgap to reach the people who don't currently have the time or luxury to be doing things the way you are. Otherwise they could subscribe to you directly at the source (and potentially even circumscribe the types of posts, keywords, or content to get exactly what they want from your site.) In some sense you syndicate there to reach and communicate with the non-IndieWeb crowd. Perhaps some of your content doesn't make as much sense there as Micro.blog is limited in what it is able to do, but that is its limitation, not yours. Eventually in a fully IndieWeb-ified world, everyone would have their own domain, their own data, and syndication of any sort won't have a real need to exist at all.

As to Jack's comment, syndicating things out to multiple places is often difficult as is getting all the responses back. (Fortunately services like Brid.gy make things far easier though they don't cover all the bases.) I do it in large part because while I prefer to own all of my content and have all the conversation take place on my personal site, I can't necessarily make that choice for everyone else. My mom is likely to never have her own domain much less a site. The only way she'll see my content (whether it's meant for her or not) is to syndicate it to Facebook. For those who aren't yet aware of the IndieWeb or using it, they're still reading and interacting on other platforms, which, for me is fine since I can still have my cake and eat it too. Eventually there will be inexpensive platforms that will let people who don't want to deal with the development cost and overhead that allow much of the IndieWeb-types of functionalities they're not currently getting from their silo platforms for free. I suspect that these will be easier and easier (as well as cheaper) to use over time. I suspect more people will use them for their freedom, flexibility, and increased control. Until then, I have the privilege of using my site much the way I would Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Flickr, GoodReads, etc., etc., I just get to do it through a more unified experience instead of having to juggle dozens of accounts and only being able to interact with my fractions of friends, family, and colleagues who coincidentally happen to be spending the time and effort to interact on those websites. As an example, I have dozens of friends who interact with me on Facebook about things I'm currently reading or finished reading, but if I was only doing this on GoodReads, they'd never have a chance to see it as they don't have accounts there or even know it exists. (Coincidentally, this is also the reason that GoodReads and most other silos allow one to syndicate their accounts to Twitter, Facebook, etc.)

Not all social sites are as lucky as Facebook to have such massive adoption. This creates a value imbalance with respect to the classic "network effect" (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect). Philosophically I think that an decentralized and distributed version of IndieWeb philosophies add far more value than having hundreds or even thousands of individual silos.

Invariably some people are likely to stick with Twitter, Facebook, or others because they don't have the same values I do. (Currently I suspect the majority do it because it's frictionless and easy.) But this doesn't change the fact that one can't have a "universal" conversation if one prefers. When I look at various platforms, some of them have different personalities and types of conversations because of the (possibly) self-selecting group of people on them. I loved Twitter more in the early days because of it's smaller and more engaged community--things have naturally changed drastically since those early days. Micro.blog is a bit more like it now, but to me it's not so much a social media replacement for Twitter. To me it's really a social reader that I use to quickly follow a subset of interesting and thoughtful people until I have a better social reader built into my own site. The conversation would be somewhat different if these silos were working on niche audience content like knitting or quantum mechanics, but typically they're not. Most social silos are geared toward mass adoption and broad topic discussion or content posting for everyone/everywhere. Their goal is for their site to be the proverbial "phone number and dial-tone of the web". Why do this when I already have a connection and a "phone number" that is my own site URL?

Jack, while some bloggers have turned off comments, they've often done so saying "Post your reply on your own site, or on Twitter, Facebook, etc." This has just pushed the conversation on their ideas off somewhere else which is disconnected and not as easily searchable or discoverable. And without some kind of notification mechanism, the author of the original post has no idea it exists. (I'll elide a conversation about blocking trolls and abuse here.) I've written some thoughts on comments sections in reply to such a blogger who recently re-enabled comments which also links to several interesting articles about the pros/cons of having comments at all. To me, between webmentions, spam filtering, and even moderation, we're lightyears ahead of where we were in the early 2000s.

One other thing I do find interesting is that the way all of this is set up is allowing us the ability to write extended thoughts and extended multiple replies (with civility as relative strangers). I don't think there are many sites on the web that allow this type of interaction, and they certainly don't do it with anything remotely close to the open architecture we're using. While at times it can be a headache for maintenance and problems, I find far more value in it than using anything else.

I'm sure I've used this same signal sub-consciously in the past. Fortunately most spammers don't bother to add avatars of any stripe. Although I've also found that even many actual legitimate commenters (and specifically WordPress users) don't know about or don't have a gravatar account either. Better yet, I've turned off traditional comments in the past in preference for webmentions, for which I've yet to see any native spam yet. The majority of people using this method seem to take their identity a bit more seriously which also raises the signal-to-noise threshold.

I suspect that markdown or semi-complicated html (like you, I occasionally like to do this too, even if it's just bold or italics) in replies are a second class citizen because most major CMSes (including Known) strip out or severely limit (for security reasons) the html that is accepted in comment fields. In fact, to conserve on space, I've even noticed that many even strip out blank lines between paragraphs! Many also will mark as spam comments that have one or more URLs in them. As a result doing fancy or even mildly complicated html or markdown in replies is something for which most platforms just don't build.

The other issue in status updates and replies is that they're often syndicated to other platforms and it's a more difficult issue to properly do this with each snowflake social media silo depending on how they individually handle html/markdown (or not). I do this sometimes in WordPress to properly format syndicated content, and it easily triples the amount of manual work, so be careful what you wish for. (This may also be the reason I love Known so much too!)

Every now and then I'll write an extended reply to someone's post that gets to the point that headings, additional structure, and the frills become much more valuable. In those cases, I'd probably then default to make them posts/articles and add the additional touches and then do a manual mark up of u-in-reply-to to have them show up as a reply instead of just a mention. This happens so generally rarely that it's not too much of a headache.

Either way, the end result on the other person's site isn't something I can ever control for, so I try not to sweat it too much. :)

For the syndicated portfolio, you might want to take a peek at the PressForward plugin for WordPress [http://pressforward.org/]. While it is a stand-alone feed reader under the hood and could be used for creating an editorial flow, it will let you use a simple bookmarklet on your work published on another site to make a quick and complete copy of the post on your own site. Within the plugin settings you can set a "time to forward" (I use one second) such that people who visit that particular post will be automatically forwarded to the original (and canonical URL) on the commissioning outlet's site.

As an example, compare:
http://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/%F0%9F%94%96-feed-reader-revolution-its-time-to-embrace-open-disrupt-social-media/ (which is a bookmark with some commentary pointing to my post)
to
http://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/ (which is an exact copy of my post, which only I can see on my backend, that redirects the viewer to the original on AltPlatform).

This is beneficial as you can syndicate (POSSE) the post with your own URL to Facebook, Twitter, et al. and folks who click to read will be sent to your site for a moment before being forwarded on to the original. Thus you get a ping and the original outlet also gets a ping (as well as the advertising revenue for it.) And if, for any reason, the original outlet goes out of business, gets sold, or disappears, you've got a word-for-word copy of your original and can simply un-forward it so that it can appear on your site as it was originally published. Naturally if you prefer and the outlet doesn't stipulate otherwise, you could publish the original to your site and not forward it (or even forward it for an exclusivity window of time pre-agreed with the original publisher.)

Additionally, if you're using Brid.gy for backfeed, anyone who comments on your POSSE copies will have their commentary sent to your site. While others won't necessarily be able to see the commentary (if you're forwarding the URL to the publisher's original), at least you'll be aware of it and can reply to it and get your own replies in return. I suspect that in the future brid.gy may be able to scrape commentary based on the syndicated URL so that your personal version aggregates commentary from the publisher's original as well as mentions of it on Facebook, Twitter, et al.

There are still some missing pieces I'd like to see in such a workflow for journalists, but it's slowly and surely getting somewhere.

(I've written about other parts of PressForward before at http://boffosocko.com/2016/12/31/pressforward-as-an-indieweb-wordpress-based-rss-feed-reader-pocketinstapaper-replacement/ as I also have an off-label use-case to replace read it later apps like Pocket and InstaPaper.)