Ok, sorry to be delayed in replying to you, Brad. I’ve had a broken blog for about two weeks. Rest assured, I’ve been reading along—around the time it broke, you wrote that Thank God for The Indieweb post and I couldn’t help but feel similarly, given that I started my blog around the same time.

I think you’ve got a great idea here—basically that Webmentions could be used to negotiate between two websites, to legitimize each other.

Maybe ‘nofollow’ links materialize into bona fide links once they each Webmention each other. I like that it could be started up from either side too. Someone who includes my directory in their blogroll is probably a good candidate to be in the directory.

One thing that I love seriously love about Webmentions is that they can just be easily killfiled. On Webmention.io, I can just nuke a mention and it’ll never come back. This means I don’t need any moderation tools built into my static blog, I can just use WIO directly.

So I think WIO is a great tool for a directory like this, because you could just build it in static HTML. In fact, this is what I’ve been doing with my directory—I am generating static HTML from a list of link descriptions. This allows me to easily host the directory aaaaaand now that you’ve mentioned this idea, I can hook up WIO in a few simple lines and have a built-in submission system!

So, yes, be flattered—I am stealing this/have stole. 😘