Webmentions as likes

Fremantle

From 100 Days of IndieWeb Challenge by James, 2 January 2023:

The IndieWeb advocates for a web-centric approach, where we leverage the building blocks of the existing web as well as a few new ones to build tools that make communication and publishing on the web easier.

Fundamentally, the internet does not have to be controlled by walled gardens. You can publish content on your own website and share that content with friends. You can even send likes to people's websites and receive likes on your site, too, using a tool called Webmention. For me, participating in the IndieWeb is partly my belief in the importance of owning your own data but also the opportunities that affords.

I've been meaning to add Webmentions to my site, but haven't yet. I do like the idea of each page displaying any (or perhaps just a count of) in-bound links. Webmentions (and old-fashioned automated crawling to find links) are a good way to find which pages out there have linked here, but they don't necessarily indicate why they've been linked. So I don't like to think of them as equivalent to 'likes', but anyway this whole thing of Fake Internet Points™ is pretty ridiculous and probably best avoided.