I was very annoyed the last time I looked at this.<p>Webmentions are like trackbacks, but trackbacks that do not contain the information needed to show them, instead relying on the receiving party to fetch that information from a microformat (that part seems to be missing from the spec).<p>What annoyed me so much that I opted to not implement it in any of those blog engines I&#x27;m involved in is that it is a useless re-invention of trackbacks. There is no point in webmentions, not one feature that could not be done with trackbacks as well. They have a wikipage arguing against trackbacks on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;indiewebcamp.com&#x2F;Trackback" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;indiewebcamp.com&#x2F;Trackback</a>, and all points on that page are wrong when looking at how blog engines actually implement trackbacks. Just take the first, fragile discovery: The critic is that the RDF comment needed for Trackbacks is is complex and get stripped. But frankly, it is not complex to grep for it and if you can&#x27;t control your own page HTML to preserve comments, you have different problems (and one that could hit your microformat equally). More important: Trackbacks actually can be found via a rel-tag in the site head exactly like pingbacks (and I guess webmentions), rel=trackback.<p>And of course blog engines verify that the origin really has a link to the receiving page, the spam problem is solved there exactly like with webmentions.<p>What should be done is to take trackbacks and formalize the current solutions and extensions into a formal protocol. There is no need to willfully cut out the existing independent web, as in blogs, for a hipster indieweb movement.<p>I guess I&#x27;m still annoyed.