WebMentions, Privacy, and DDoS - Oh My!


Crappy line drawing explaining the above.

Mastodon - the distributed social network - has two interesting challenges when it comes to how users share links. I'd like to discuss those issues and suggest a possible way forward. When you click on a link on my website which takes you to another website, your browser sends a Referer. This says to the other site "Hey, I came here using a link on shkspr.mobi". This is useful because it lets a site owner know who is linking to them. I love seeing which weird and wonderful sites have linked …

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Is Open Graph Protocol dead?


Robot faced Mark Zuckerberg is wearing a VR headset - it digs painfully into his smiling cheeks.

Facebook Meta - like many other tech titans - has institutional Shiny Object Syndrome. It goes something like this: Launch a product to great fanfare Spend a few years hyping it as ✨the future✨ Stop answering emails and pull requests If you're lucky, announce that the product is abandoned but, more likely, just forget about it. Open Graph Protocol (OGP) is one of those products. The value-proposition is simple. It's hard for computers to pick out the main headline, image, and other data …

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