Flutterby™! : IndieWeb musings & flounderings

I went to last night's Homebrew Website Club, and though I enjoy seeing the enthusiasm of people working on things they're excited about, and will probably go back (in two weeks?), I've got mixed feelings...

So last night I implemented http://webmention.org/ for inbound links to Flutterby comments. It seems like the latest in a long chain of such things, from referer(sic) tracking to Trackback to Pingback that's easy enough to throw together, but is eventually going to be used for spamming (and, yes, before I dropped support for those previous things I was getting spamming from people implementing the inbound links). It also really looks like unless people implement it very carefully (I haven't yet), it's a huge amplification attack vector (if you can get a thousand sites that have implemented webmention, send a pingback request for a large file on your target site, boom, instant DDOS).

Distributed "Like"s and comments and all... well... There are some cool abuses if IFRAMEs and JavaScript coming, but...

The thing about the early blog community that made it so interesting wasn't that we were all interested in the technology, it's that we were interested in the technology as an end to pursue our other interests. The same thing with the BBS scene. And Facebook and Twitter: Nobody's going to Facebook and Twitter thinking "oh, cool technology", they're going there thinking "here's a community of interesting people I can talk to".

Is the concern about owning our own data enough to be that critical mass? Because all of the old school bloggers are on to other things now, none of them really care about all the details of ownership.

So I enjoyed the conversation last night, I'm skeptical that adding http://webmention.org/ will do anything other than being a technology I'll need to rip out later, but I'm really more interested in conversations about topics where tech is the enabling thing, not where the tech is the end goal.