person mention

From IndieWeb

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person mention is a homepage webmention sent to a person's homepage.

Why

You should send person mentions whenever you post one of these so people can be notified that you've mentioned them!

You should accept person mentions of/to your site so you can find out when others have mentioned you!

How

How to person mention

Send a webmention as you usually would:

  • source: your post permalink
  • target: the person's homepage URL

If you're doing something beyond merely mentioning someone, e.g. inviting them to an event, or person-tagging them, then see these pages for how to add that markup:

How to receive person mentions

You should separate out webmentions to your homepage into a separate list on your site, perhaps even sending you notifications for each using your preferred notification mechanism.

How to distinguish person mentions

When you receive a person mention, it may mean something more, here's how you tell.

  • invitation: if the target link to your home page is a u-invitee link, then you've been invited to the event linked to by the in-reply-to of that h-entry
  • person-tag: someone tagged you in their (source) post, if the target link to your home page is a u-category link.
    • unless the containing h-entry has a u-tag-of link, in which case the source is merely tagging you in a different post, the post that the u-tag-of links to.
  • ...
  • otherwise it's just a mention.

Once you've distinguished different kinds of person mentions, you may want to:

  • display these differently (in abovementioned list on your site), e.g. with different icons, prose, clustering, and/or sorting than "plain" person mentions
  • send different notifications for (or maybe only send for some not for all) different kinds of person mentions
  • provide different UI on each in a list, e.g.
    • for person-tags, perhaps provide the option to request "untagging" ("untag-of" link?)
    • for invitations, provide RSVP buttons yes, no, maybe, save which could one-click create respective RSVP posts on your site and send webmentions accordingly (back to the invitation, and to the event as well).

IndieWeb Examples

Examples of IndieWeb sites that send and/or receive person mentions and do something visible (perhaps only to the site owner) with them.

Laurent Eschenauer

Published mentions of people using @domain.tld syntax since around 2013-03-26, as evidenced in:

Ben Roberts

  • Ben Roberts displays all webmentions to his homepage url under "Recent Mentions" on the sidebar since YYYY-MM-DD(?)

Tantek

Tantek Çelik started using @domain.tld syntax since at least 2017-12-11

@aaronpk.com paid in full via Venmo! Thanks for the @BlueStarDonuts! 🍩🍩🍩🍩

and added it to the CASSIS auto link function on 2017-12-13

Before that, Tantek Çelik had experimented in 2011 with the +Name syntax from Google+, in blog posts referring to people by full name and linking to their domain:

Silo Examples

See Also

  • homepage
  • webmention
  • person-tag
  • invitation
  • message
  • snitch tagging
  • to-do: describe how a "person mention" on the IndieWeb heavily overlaps with @-domain mentions (as noted in @domain description above), and is related to but different from an @-mention (or @mention) on a silo or an @-@ mention to a Mastodon or other fediverse account.
  • to-do: describe How To use Bridgy Fed to @-@ person mention someone’s Mastodon profile
  • Use 'https:' when auto-linking @-mentions or @-@-mentions per https://tantek.com/2023/011/t1/indieweb-evolving-at-mention
    • "One of the fun things about #IndieWeb notes & replies is that how we post is actively evolving! Like how should we @ someone?

      #socialMedia aliases (e.g. @Twitter) were obvious, with prior @-name usage on Flickr etc.

      Now, some have a domain, or an @-@ (pronounced at-at, yes, just like the abbreviation for Imperial All Terrain Armored Transport¹), or some have both.

      We can ask questions like why do we @-someone? What are the use-cases?
      * In a reply to a public post, clearly express that you’re speaking to that person
      * In a reply to a reply, that you’re speaking to everyone upthread (AKA a https://indieweb.org/canoe)
      * When attributing something to someone (photo/post/cool thing by so-and-so), giving credit
      * Distinguish a person (or something that can be followed) from “just” a site
      * For all the above, notifying someone accordingly

      Some ideas:

      1. Ideally, if/when everyone has their own domain (where they receive Webmention notifications, and a feed you can follow), we can @-name their domain, which your auto-linker² should hyperlink accordingly, e.g.
      * @aaronparecki.com @anomalily.net @Martymcgui.re‎ @david.shanske.com @voxpelli.com @adactio.com @marcthiele.com @mxb.dev

      These all look close enough to social media aliases/names that they’re immediately recognizable as readable @-names, a good consideration when choosing a domain name.³

      2. As a fallback (e.g. for non-@-domain-auto-linking destinations) we can use someone’s plain domain (explicitly with https:), especially if their home page still has a stream or feed you can follow, or maybe if they don’t receive homepage Webmentions (yet), e.g.:
      * https://jacky.wtf/ https://tmichellemoore.com/ https://crowdersoup.com/

      3. Some folks with personal sites have (for now) created separate Mastodon accounts (or installed an instance on a subdomain), and for them, we can reference their @-@ parenthetically after their domain, like:
      * https://kevinmarks.com/ (@kevinmarks@xoxo.zone), https://dangillmor.com/ (@dangillmor@mastodon.social), https://simonwillison.net/ (@simon@simonwillison.net)

      Rather than using social media silo @-names (except when explicitly replying to a silo), I’m now experimenting with all three of these (1-3) instead, both to elevate people’s IndieWeb identities, and for Mastodon viewers, provide a convenient way to follow @-@ addresses.

      If someone’s homepage receives Webmentions, they will get notified when I @-mention them by domain.

      I recently implemented syntactic auto-linking of @-@ addresses like this:
      * @user@example.com --> https://example.com/@user
      with a special case for @-domain@-domain to just link to the domain, e.g.:
      * @tantek.com@tantek.com --> https://tantek.com/

      I also made a recent policy decision to auto-link all @-@ (and @-domain) mentions to https:, the reasoning being that identities on the web should be using https.
      * Testing in production here: https://tantek.com/cassis.js, search for "auto_link("

      Some questions:
      * Does/do Mastodon (or other ActivityPub servers) notify people when you @-@ mention them in a post? How? Who’s responsible for that?
      * Will Bridgy Fed notify the servers (deliver to AP inboxes) of folks I merely @-@ mention (rather than explicit replies, reposts)? Should it?

      So many people are switching to using their personal domains to post (or at least a Mastodon account) that I no longer feel compelled to @-mention people’s Twitter handles in posts, which feels refreshing.

      Now the fun part is experimenting and figuring out what combination of @-domain, plain domain, or @-@ mentions looks good, makes sense to people, and sends notifications to people the way they want to receive them.

      This is day 11 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb #100Days.

      ← Day 10: https://tantek.com/2023/010/t2/build-use-services
      → Day 12: https://tantek.com/2023/012/t1/six-years-webmention-w3c

      ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT-AT
      ² My https://tantek.com/github/cassis/blob/master/cassis.js auto_link() function supports @example.com auto-linking, yours should too.
      ³ https://tantek.com/2023/004/t1/choosing-domain-name-indieweb" @Tantek Çelik January 11, 2023
  • https://tantek.com/2024/070/t1/updated-auto-linking-mention-use-cases
    • "Updated the auto-linking code¹ on my website last Sunday to handle a few more @-mention use-cases.

      In particular:
      * @-domains with dashes/hyphens like @sonja-weckenmann.de
      * @-@ with (some) Unicode alphabetic characters like @briansuda@loðfíll.is
      * @-domain-and-path for indicating @-mentions of silo profiles that don’t support @-@ syntax, like @flickr.com/people/tantek or @instagram.com/tantek

      I also dropped auto-linking of URLs with user:password "userinfo", since they’ve been long abandoned and effectively deprecated because there’s fairly wide agreement that such basic HTTP authentication² was poorly designed and should not be used (and thus should not be linked).

      If you’re curious you can take a look at https://tantek.com/cassis.js, which has updated functions:
      * auto_link_re() — regular expression to recognize URLs, @-mentions, @-@, and footnotes to link
      * auto_link() — specifically the code to recognize different kinds of @-@ and @-mentions and link them properly to profiles, domains, and paths.

      This code is only live on my website (testing in production³ as it were) for now, and you’re welcome to copy/paste to experiment with it. I plan to test it more over the coming weeks (or so) and when I feel it is sufficiently well tested, will update it on GitHub⁴ as well.

      With this additional auto-linking functionality, I feel I have a fairly complete implementation of how to auto-link various URLs and @-mentions, and plan to write that up at least as a minimal “list of use-cases and how they should work” auto-linking specification.

      This (blog post) is my contribution to today’s #IndieWebCamp Brighton⁵ #hackday!

      This was originally a project I wanted to complete during IndieWebCamp Nuremberg last October, however I was pre-occupied at the time with fixing other things.⁶

      #autolink #atmention #atmentions #atat #atatmention

      This is post 12 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts

      ← https://tantek.com/2024/047/t1/indieweb-major-update-design
      → https://tantek.com/2024/072/t1/created-at-indiewebcamp-brighton


      ¹ https://tantek.com/cassis.js
      ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_access_authentication
      ³ https://indieweb.org/test_in_production
      ⁴ https://tantek.com/github/cassis
      ⁵ https://indieweb.org/2024/Brighton
      ⁶ https://tantek.com/2023/302/t1/indiewebcamp-completed-projects" @Tantek Çelik March 10, 2024
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