Privacy and Webmentions

Following my recent post about not checking Mastodon, a reader raised an interesting privacy concern regarding Webmentions. They explained that they had stopped using Webmentions altogether because Fediverse users often don't realise - or explicitly consent to - their replies being republished on an external blog. This surprised me, as I'd never considered that Webmentions could be a privacy concern. To my mind, a public post on an open platform like Mastodon is precisely that: public. The Fediverse is decentralised by design. When you reply to someone, your message doesn't remain isolated on your home instance; it federates across countless independent servers. Pulling a public reply onto kevquirk.com via a Webmention bridge is conceptually no different from fosstodon.org relaying a reply originally posted on mastodon.social. Unless the concern is about deletion persistence (e.g. cached mentions remaining if a post is deleted), I struggle to see where the privacy violation lies when…