Thinking about privacy and webmentions

I was perusing the always lovely website of one mr. V.H. Belvadi and stumbled my way onto a post titled “Webmentions, copyright and privacy” and from there quickly landed on Kev’s post titled “Privacy and Webmentions”. I find the topic very interesting because it sits at the intersection of two things I care much about: web based technology and human interactions. And so I’m gonna spend a moment thinking in public about this. The first issue I personally see in this overall discussion is the way Webmentions are framed. Quoting from Kev’s post: 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 That to me doesn’t really square well with what Webmentions were designed for. If you open the W3C Recommendation for Webmention, you’ll see that right at the top the Abstract reads:…