As Tantek mentions in his talk, webmentions are basically evolved pingbacks. It has yet to be proven if Webmentions will be killed by spam in the same way pingbacks were.

Also with comments, there is a constant fight against spam. Thankfully we have decent anti-spam tools but every now and then spam does get through.

In my opinion, if we want to bring decentralized social networking to more relevance again, users shouldn’t have to deal with spam content.

I very much concur with Tantek that it’d be a great solution to all the social silos of the web to have everyone have their own website and their own (sub)domain.

Therefore, I’ve created the Friends Plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/friends/ which allows you to establish friendship connections between (WordPress) sites.

It’s actually pretty cool what these established connections then allow for:

– You get a feed of all the posts of your friends, writing their posts on their own site.
– You can received your (selected) friends posts by e-mail (I think these are quite powerful, you can turn any RSS feed (filtered by keywords if you want) into a newsletter for yourself).
– You can then restrict the interactions to your friends, thus removing random spam.
– You can post content that only your friends can see (via private posts).
– You can emoji-react to posts.
– You can subscribe to news outlets via RSS and have them integrated into your feeds alongside your friends.
– The WordPress app gives you a social media client for free: you simply post to your own blog.

Check out the demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bz6GluXnsk

This could be the basis to further reduce dependency of third parties without a worse experience:

We could have specialized mobile apps (e.g. an image posting app) that would talk to your own blog. You’d post stuff there and it will be spread to your friends. It’d display your friends images in the app as well, allowing for the same experience like with Instagram, just without a third party involved.

From a technology perspective, the friends plugin is just a web based RSS reader. Your server does the work for you by fetching your friends’ posts.

Your own /friends/ page could be your new Facebook feed.

It’s going to be more fun when your friends have installed the friends plugin, but it’s already useful as is: you can subscribe to the blogs you already read.

The friends plugin is far from being finished but it allows for very interesting third-party reduced usage of the web.