@tkadlec @rachelandrew I've been using webmentions for a while and I really love it. It's transformed how I use the web. It also induces people to take greater ownership of the content they're posting to the web. (Tumblr did this in a sense as their form of reply caused one to post it to the top of their stream rather than hiding it in a separate tab like Twitter does). I find that with a higher level of ownership (actual) people are less likely to spam others.

If you want an example, I'm using Brid.gy to "force" Twitter to support webmentions, so you can like this post or reply to it on Twitter, and your comment (moderate-able) will show up below and my own site will send me a notification of your response.

Though there is a potential question of webmention "spam" (less likely than other prior methods due to the specification), some services like Automattic's Akismet are already supporting filtering for it.

@csarven @rhiaro future = academic samizdat + webmention

@ivasef85 @lukashmayyn @Anthony I also have @mentions on my site courtesy of an Webmention implementation. https://indieweb.org/webmention

@aaronpk @indiescripter Another option to encourage others to post their replies on their own sites rather than directly on yours, you could provide a URL box and details for people to webmention you indirectly (especially if they don't support Webmention yet). See the comment section at the bottom of http://boffosocko.com/2016/12/28/homebrew-website-club-los-angeles-notes-december-28-2016/ for an example or see https://github.com/pfefferle/wordpress-webmention-form for some sample code. I think I've yet to have someone take advantage of the option, but my IndieWeb heart feels warm for providing it as an encouraging option.

For additional ideas, see: http://indieweb.org/web_actions

@indiescripter I think you've probably got a pretty good start on the IndieWeb philosophy. And an even better start in that you're writing your thoughts on your own website first and then syndicating them to silos like Twitter.

I think that part of what you're missing about being able to reply to Aaron's original post is that his site both sends and accepts a new web protocol known as Webmention (http://indieweb.org/webmention). Thus on his original post, you'll see that I've "liked" it by making a post on my own site (http://stream.boffosocko.com/2016/liked-aaron-pareckis-100-days-of-indieweb-147eda7b83), and then in the background sending a webmention from my server to his to notify him about it. He can then decide whether or not to accept and/or display it (in this case mine appears next to his star icon at the bottom of the post). For the likes and comments/replies on his post, you can hover and find the permalinks for all of the responses on other people's originating sites. I'm sure yours would have shown up too, but I suspect that your site isn't sending webmentions yet, so his site is unaware that your post exists. I'm sure he'll have seen the Twitter response you gave though.

I know Aaron also often syndicates copies of his posts to Twitter. There's another IndieWeb related service known as Brid.gy which bootstraps webmentions onto Twitter (in addition to other social silos) so that replies or comments to the copy that got syndicated to Twitter also send copies to the original post. In this case, he only syndicated it to news.indieweb.org, so it was less simple for you to have interacted with his post because there wasn't a Twitter version for you to interact with.

You'll find that within the broader community that different members will support varying levels of functionality (based mostly on what they're interested in), so someone like Tantek (tantek.com) will post on his own site and syndicate to Twitter, but he doesn't yet display webmentions. You can, however, post your replies to him on your own site and syndicate them to Twitter (perhaps using Brid.gy publish?) to reply to his syndicated copy on Twitter where he'll see the notification of your reply. You yourself serve as another example as you don't (yet?) offer a comment field on your own post. Perhaps you may never, but that's your choice. (I'll mention incidentally that many static website owners are using Aaron's Webmention.io for sending/receiving webmentions, see also: https://indieweb.org/webmention.io.)

I think that a lot of the goal is to not only have fun with what you're doing on your own website, but do things which you find interesting/useful for yourself. Are you interested in locations/check-ins [http://indieweb.org/location]? Reading related posts [http://indieweb.org/read]? Maybe other types of status updates [http://indieweb.org/posts]? Always work on your own itches [http://indieweb.org/itch] first.

Just be careful, because lurking in IRC or browsing the IndieWeb wiki for a while and seeing what others are working on or doing can make you very "itchy". Though the reverse is true that seeing what others have done (even how silos have done things in the past) can make it easier for you to build it not only better, but perhaps more quickly. Perhaps the CMS or language you're using is being used by others in the community [http://indieweb.org/projects]? This may make it easier for you to go farther/faster by using their opensource code, or perhaps make it better by contributing some of your own thoughts/feedback/code?

Keep up the search, and let us know if we can be of further help/assistance.

The IndieWeb plugin does have quite a few related plugins which all interact well, but you don't necessarily need them all. You can obviously pick and choose based on the specific functionality you'd like to have. Their modularity helps to make understanding what sets of functionality each piece provides a lot easier.

In particular the two that will recreate most of the requested functionality of wp-social above are [Webmention ](https://wordpress.org/plugins/webmention/)and [Semantic Linkbacks](https://wordpress.org/plugins/semantic-linkbacks/). These provide an endpoint that Bridgy can target to send your comments and likes from other social media sites. To my knowledge, they don't require any settings or set up other than uploading and activation.

The other sub-plugins within the larger IndieWeb suite add supplementary functionality if you want/need it. This also helps to cut down on code bloat which can slow your site down. In fact, if you only want a few in the suite, you can install them separately from the larger plugin. The others also help to not only extend functionality, but to better automate portions of it.

They are all also are being actively developed/supported on GitHub.

@zack06007 It looks to me like this plugin isn't being actively maintained and I don't even see it in the main WordPress.org repository anymore. It's also possible that with the recent WP 4.7 update some of the functionalities have broken further. The last commit to the code was almost a year and a half ago with the bulk of the code being even older.

If you'd like to maintain a lot of this functionality in a better way with some smaller discrete plugins I would recommend the following:
- [**JetPack** ](https://wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack/)or [**Social Media Network Poster**](https://wordpress.org/plugins/social-networks-auto-poster-facebook-twitter-g/) for syndicating/sharing your content to Facebook, Twitter, et al. JetPack is simpler to set up, but SNAP provides a lot more customization and has some good documentation.
- [**IndiwWeb Plugin for WordPress**](https://wordpress.org/plugins/indieweb/) - This will allow you to add some sub-plugins like Webmention and some simple comment plugins which will let your comments/likes/etc. come back to your pages and posts. The Syndication Links plugin within the IndieWeb plugin will allow you to easily display which services you syndicated individual content.
- [**Brid.gy**](http://brid.gy) - Connecting to this free service will give you comments, likes, and reactions from major social hubs like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, G+, and Flicker to come back to your original content in a pretty way. It is expandable to other platforms if you'd like to contribute to the code base. Bridgy uses their open APIs to bootstrap the new W3C Webmention spec to send the comments back to your site using the Webmention plugin within the IndieWeb Plugin mentioned above. Webmention is essentially an internet wide @mention functionality much like Twitter and Medium have.

If you need more help in setting these up or using them, feel free to visit http://indieweb.org/WordPress which has lots of documentation or ask in the [IndieWeb chat](http://indieweb.org/irc) where someone can help point you in the right direction.

Because you're on Known, you're definitely sending webmentions (presuming you're using the default set up), but it may be the case that gRegorLove isn't accepting them, or it's possible that he's moderating them too (which several definitely do). [According to https://indieweb.org/webmention, he's both sending and receiving.] Not everyone in IndieWeb necessarily accepts webmentions (yet). You could ask him in the #indieweb IRC, or alternately ping him via @mention in Twitter as he often syndicates his content there as well to check.

@mbeisen @CharleenDAdams @dgermain21 @notSoJunkDNA @EpgntxEinstein @WiringTheBrain also great eg. 4 value of http://indieweb.com/webmention on journal articles

I keep coming back to this post and thinking, “Why doesn’t Medium support mentions internet-wide instead of just within their own ecosystem?” Medium could support the W3C’s Webmention spec and essentially support @mentions not only here but even to other sites — including Twitter perhaps? How cool would it be to post a short reply (or like/favorite) on Twitter and have it show up on the related Medium post as a comment/like?!

The concept is essentially a more modern/secure version of trackback/pingback, but with more flexibility.

I have just gone through the process of setting up Medium's plugin, so I'm giving that a spin for a couple weeks prior to kicking the tires of SNAP's integration. SNAP has done an excellent job on other platforms, so I'm guessing they're using all the available features there and probably have a stronger 1-1 mapping of data from one platform to the other, particularly as Medium is aiming at WordPress directly first. The one thing you might want to be careful about with Medium is making sure you don't have a "rel=canonical" tag [https://indieweb.org/rel-canonical] showing up on your Medium post, otherwise you might be getting docked by Google and others with respect to SEO. I know the Medium plugin handles this well, but haven't checked on how IFTTT or SNAP handle this yet.

I'm curious what specifically you found confusing about IndieWeb? Some of us in the WordPress group have been trying to make the value proposition and workflow better, particularly over the past several months. (Admittedly, before about April, the onboarding process was MUCH messier and the end user had to do a lot more reading/discovery and work to set things up, but I think the hurdle has moved much lower since then.) If you take a look at it again, I'd love to know where you experience problems/issues, so we can make things better for others. If you need help, there are many of us on IRC [https://indieweb.org/IRC] who can often help in real time.

As for privacy, in general, Facebook, Google+, et all are all public facing networks, so people posting there are really posting for everyone to see in the first place. If they're posting privately, I believe that the IndieWeb protocols respect that and don't import private webmentions. Most of the rest is about data ownership for you and your blog as well as trying to maintain a central repository for your blogs posts of all the conversation taking place around what you're posting. Part of the downfall of social media is that it can often fragment conversations. In some sense IndieWeb helps glue them all back together.

On your last point, I had a bit of cognitive dissonance with this as well when I started into IndieWeb, but I've just streamlined my workflow significantly (and for the better). I've turned off all the emails and notifications from individual social media platforms (at least as they relate to my content) and I rely on my WordPress install to do all the notifications. This way, for example, when someone replies to one of my posts on Facebook, I see the webmention via WordPress, and then use that to click on the contained link to the reply on Facebook. I'll then reply natively on Facebook so the other party sees it there (typically by Facebook notification), but then the IndieWeb backend ports over my comment back to the comments section of my own blog. My "audience" can follow me on their platform of choice, and I can still interact, but I still own all the resulting data: Win-win-win!

The concept of task completion in IndieWeb also reminds me a little of the functionality GoodRead.com has for updating one's status on reading a book: Either I'm on page X of Y or I'm X% done with book. Eventually one completes the book. In their UI, they also present a completion bar with the percentage of the book that's read to give a visual indicator as well. I don't suppose there's any reason a webmention couldn't also include a percentage finished to add this piece of data.