The End of the Road for Webmentions
Nearly six months ago, I put quite a bit of effort into setting up webmentiond so I could accept Webmentions. The server remained functional and eager to receive communications until the beginning of October, although I hadn’t yet got around to either displaying them or sending them myself (which was alright since, as it happens, I never got any to display).
Meanwhile, ever since I last wrote about observability, I’ve been steadily rebuilding the infrastructure for my tiny online presence in a robust and reproducible way, including the Kubernetes cluster hosting webmentiond. (The story of that journey is an extremely long and complicated one, which I plan to write about at length soon enough.) When I reached the point where I needed to test a new automated webmentiond deployment, I had to temporarily redirect the webmentions.shivjm.blog domain. I finished my testing that same day, but then simply… didn’t change it back.
After mulling it over for a week and a half, I concluded there was no reason to continue to maintain the server. I’ve removed the reference to the Webmentions endpoint from my HTML. I don’t mean to ignore my hypothetical readers, but I’ve grown rather fond of the current version of A Place For My Head, and I just don’t believe adding—also entirely hypothetical thus far—comments or Webmentions would suit it. With luck, my efforts on the infrastructure front will bear fruit and I’ll be able to start working on a self-hosted social media presence in the near future, which should serve as a partial replacement.