It is entirely possible that Baroness Benjamin has placed Author Buzz UK on the chopping block without meaning to.

I grew up watching Floella Benjamin on television. She started appearing on TV the year I was born (yes, I am very old). So imagine my surprise to see her name on a private members’ bill that could shut down UK-based Mastodon instances along with Author Buzz and possibly a lot of forums and blogs.

Author Buzz (UK) is a small forum for book lovers and authors where sharing news and talking about books is the norm. It has some social media features such as following and posting status updates. It also hosts blogs, allows users to create forums, and pulls RSS feeds from relevant bookish sources.

All that could go away if this bill passes, as I would have to apply for a license and employ specialists to comply with all the terms.

Here’s the definition of social media according to the bill:

Meaning of social media platform

For the purposes of this Act, a “social media platform” means a platform which—

(a) has the sole or significant purpose of enabling users to create, share, discover or consume user-generated content;

(b) enables users to discover, interact with or follow the content or accounts of users other than those with whom they communicate privately.

Section 3 of the Social Media Platforms (Ofcom Licensing) Bill [HL] 2026

Those are some broad terms. Part (b), for example, could be argued to describe forums along with blogs with RSS feeds and comments. This could hit Author Buzz UK in every way possible.

A blog with comments and an RSS feed of comments allows users to discover user-generated content satisfying part (a). The RSS feed satisfies part (b), allowing following the content of others. As a network of blogs and forums, Author Buzz is a social media. As a UK-based site, it would be regulated into dust.

I take comfort in the fact that private members’ bills rarely pass. Otherwise, Author Buzz UK would have to come down, and most of my other blogs could be likewise under the hammer.

While it is still alive, why not visit Author Buzz and tell us what you are reading?

Webmention is a great idea. An idea that could be used for even more things than it is used for right now. These are some wild and unfettered ideas I had today about Webmention and things you could do with it.

Introduction

In the wee small hours of this morning, I added a new section to Open Mentions – Brainstorming. The first brainstorming topic I added was New Uses of Webmention.

In this section, I’m going to introduce my topic and explain what brainstorming is so all readers are up to speed. You can skip to the wild ideas if you wish.

What is brainstorming?

Brainstorming is when a bunch of people get together to generate ideas. All ideas are written down, and only later are any of them validated. This means that the silly-sounding idea that might turn out not to be so silly gets a chance to breathe without anyone holding back for fear of looking silly.

Brainstorming is a creativity technique in which a group of people interact to suggest ideas spontaneously in response to a prompt. Stress is typically placed on the volume and variety of ideas, including ideas that may seem outlandish or “off-the-wall”. Ideas are noted down during the activity, but not assessed or critiqued until later. The absence of criticism and assessment is intended to avoid inhibiting participants in their idea production.

Brainstorming, Wikiedpia

What’s Webmention, then?

Webmention is a cool technology that allows you to ping a page to tell it that you have mentioned it. The page admin can then list mentions if they like.

Webmention is an open web standard (W3C Recommendation) for conversations and interactions across the web, a powerful building block used for a growing distributed network of peer-to-peer comments, likes, reposts, and other responses across the web.

Webmention, IndieWeb

On almost all my blogs, Webmention is a way you can post comments by posting your own content on your own blog or website. I think everyone should give it a go.

You don’t even need to run Webmention on your blog to ping another one. When you are done reading this (assuming you are reading on my blog and not on Mastodon or something), you will see a form where you can ping your mention to this post. My blog will do all the work for you.

I’ve written a lot about Webmention in the past, including a list of every last Webmention library I could find. Webmention was the inspiration for Open Mentions. It seemed like such an obvious idea that I was surprised no one had made something like it already. Maybe there are more Webmention ideas out there in the wild; we should share them.

No one is going to pick up your idea and run with it unless they first encounter your idea.

Webmention links

• webmention.io – a third-party service for webmentions.
• brid.gy – a service for sending webmentions

The wild ideas

The yes-and-no debate with twin webmentions

Most questions in the real world are not so much yes or no and more, “it depends” and “sometimes, perhaps”. This is what makes a good yes-and-no debate fun. Imagine someone writes a post introducing a question and publishes it with two Webmention endpoints – one for arguing yes and the other for arguing no.

From a technical standpoint, I would imagine that the twin mentions format actually has two child pages with one endpoint each.

For WordPress, I guess this would be a post that has two custom post types attached, such that example.com/post/my-question has example.com/post/my-question/yes and example.com/post/my-question/ne. The post might need some sort of custom template to show two columns of comments (which is how WordPress stores mentions).

Go, sports team!

This one might take a bit of work to set up. You generate a set of pages, one for each team in the sport you follow. Add to each one an 88×31 in the team’s colours – maybe other banner sizes as well – and some copy-and-paste code to make adding it easy. Now, every blog with an author who supports the team can:

1. Show team pride with a nice badge
2. Add their page to the team page so other supporters of the sports team can find them.

Enthusiasts could post match reports, news, transfers, and all the other stuff sports lovers like to track and talk about. With a simple link and a ping, the news ends up on an Open Topic where the sports team’s fans might lurk.

I’m not a sports person myself. I understand that it is a fun form of mostly harmless tribalism that others enjoy, though. If there are enough personal website-owning sports fans, this could be a thing.

I believe that… AKA author infoboxes

You may wish to select a finite, bounded set of ideas for this one, but what about a set of pages that can be linked to (perhaps with 88×11 badges) for personal beliefs, political ideas, and other worldviews?

With a substantial enough collection, you might have enough that your personal website or my personal website could fully enumerate all of our opinions on a subset of all matters in the world.

While there might be some scope for some heated debates, there could also be some fun ones. I’m thinking of the topic of bedtime.

• I believe early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and rich.
• I believe the best ideas happen after midnight
• I believe that mornings should be illegal

You get the idea.

A variant idea (using 88x31s perhaps) might be a collection of userboxes like the ones on Wikipedia. Webmention could ensure that each page is a self-updating directory of who claims which tag/box/label/thing.

I made something somewhat similar with isbrill.com, except you can’t (currently) vote agreement with Webmention (only ActivityPub). I should probably fix that.

Book review Open Topic

If you did a little coding so that every ISBN had a page, you would have a distributed Webmention-powered API for book reviews.

Personally, I’d have a system that has a URL ending with an ISBN. The system assumes all ISBNs are valid (within reason) and generates a page if one has not yet been made. There’s enough API for book information that, over time, you could populate the pages with a book cover, blurb, author, and other related bookish details.

This idea is basically Open Mentions but for books.

Maybe you don’t want to do that for all possible books, but if you are an author, maybe do it for each of your books. That way you collect reviews on your site for your books (social proof moves mountains) and you can learn a little about your readers.

Voting on The Web We Want (not my idea, but it was too cool to leave out).

The Web We Want is a site where various possible wants for the web are listed, and votes come in by WebMention.

Votes are tallied from webmention “bookmarks” and “likes” of each want’s page. These could be hand-crafted webmentions sent from your own site or shares and likes on social media services combed by Brid.gy. We’re hopeful that this approach captures community sentiment well, but reserve the right to change or alter the voting process in the future.

Voting for the web you want

I only learned about this site today, and it is, in my opinion, a fantastic idea.

Run polls with Webmention

Polls are fun. At least, I think they are. Rarely do I let a poll scroll past me on social media without a vote. Now, I will admit to being something of a munchkin – I will gleefully vote in polls I don’t understand. I am why you need a large sample set so that noise like me doesn’t skew your results.

Webmention can be used to send likes. And, as such, a mention with content is just a vote with an added comment.

All you would need is a page for the question and pages for the answers. Icing on the cake would be a bit of the question page that counts the mentions on its children and gives you a vote chart. To be honest, this is the exact same technology needed for the yes-and-no debate idea.

Make a fan site for a band or musician you love

I imagine it would not be too much work to make a minisite with every album, song, and tour of your favourate music group. Now you and other fans can track exactly what the fandom is talking about right now.

I imagine you might find lyrics and their meanings filed under songs, reviews for albums, and selfies with the band on certain tour pages.

To be honest, any band with an indieweb fan contingent should probably set this up for themselves (or get the fan club manager to do it).

What now?

Those ideas are all nice and everything, but what now?

Well, you have a few options:

• Pray, hope, or chant in the hope someone implements the idea you like.
• Actually talk about the idea you like, in the hope that someone with the right skills fancies making it happen.
• Say, “hold my drink,” and write a brainstorming post of your own.
• Shrug, agree these are nice ideas and get on with your day.
• Steal one or more of these ideas. No, seriously, help yourself.
• Leave a long, rambly comment that should have been a blog post.
• Something else…

Whatever you choose, this is the bit where I say, “over to you”. Comment, mention, or reply. Like, share, or subscribe to my RSS feed. Come on, we all know how this bit works.

Thoughts?

So, I saw a weird headline on social media today: “How having a disability became cool“. Oh dear lord, here we go again. Another author of “news” that is entirely made up… Deep sigh.

Poppy Coburn, Associate Comment Editor for The Telegraph, takes a pop at the “‘sickfluencers’, are turning chronic illness into a lifestyle trend”. Except the only ones using that word are news outlets trying to sell newspapers. It’s made up.

Two years on, there’s an avalanche of results talking about it. The thing is, all of those pages and pages of news articles are all quoting each other. It’s as if a whole trend has been summoned into being just so the people summoning it can be outraged.

Another title for this might have been: Why is the press so keen to demonise my people? Because the right-leaning whiney-bitch newspapers (such as The Sun and The Daily Mail) lead the charge in attacking people with mental health issues, coining the term “sickfluencer” back in 2024.

Disabled people living with mental health conditions came on the receiving end of an exponential surge in corporate media attacks against benefit claimants in 2024.

REVEALED: MSM disproportionately targets mental health-related DWP claimants in attack articles

This is the thing, there’s no such thing as a “sickfluencer”. It’s a BS term that the panic merchants want to sell you because hate and panic make money.

The DWP already apply rigorous means testing. Under the Conservatives, they turned that assessment up to 11 to placate the Daily Mail. The result was chaos, suffering, and deaths. There’s no free ride on benefits.

The mind boggles that people believe that sick people are getting £60,000. If that were the case, where’s my cash? Oh, right, it doesn’t exist.

Under both Conservative and Labour governments, the DWP have colluded with the press to demonise younger claimants living with mental health issues, ADHD and autism. Ministers have joined in, to create a smokescreen which obscures the politically inconvenient truth that the majority of those at risk of losing their personal independence payment (PIP) under the Green paper proposals are older people with physical health conditions – many of whom have worked all their adult life until they became ill.

Mental health PIP claimants demonised as cover for massive assault on physical health awards

Being disabled isn’t “suddenly cool”. The truth that so frightened these journalists is that suffering in silence is a thing of the past. I certainly gave up struggling unseen – I started a whole blog about it.

Just because I picked up a physical disability, it doesn’t make the mental health crap I suffer from any less real. Now I get a pass because I have a “real” disability. I’ve got a strange brain and a broken body – that’s twice as hard, not easier.

I’m not sitting back in my mansion raking in piles of cash. I’m spending money I don’t have to try and live my life somewhat normally. Yeah, I get a bit of PIP. It’s not a fortune. It covers a few cabs and some assistance. Just like everyone else, I have to budget as well as I can to get by. I am not part of the have-yachts; I’m part of the have-to-be-careful crew. Same as most everyone else.

Rather than reposting two-year-old Daily Mail BS, can we not have a journalist with a shred of journalistic integrity willing to call out the snowballing lie? But no. Apparently, Poppy would rather repeat the attack line given to her by the hate media just so there’s someone the rabid crowd can point out as “the reason things are bad”.

If the billionaire newspaper owners can get you hating the poor and the sick, maybe you won’t notice that they were the ones that fucked up the world.

Struggling weirdo’s like me are not the reason for the cost of living. We’re not trying to be cool. You are being lied to by the 1% through the mouthpiece of the likes of Poppy Coburn.

To end on a better note, here is a podcast taking a more level-headed approach to the silly headlines, including a guest who was on the direct receiving end of it.

From time to time, I have to admit that I just have too many tabs open. Which means I am not likely to get back to them any time soon. When that happens, I make a post like this and just link out to all the pages I’ve been holding open. That way, I can come back to them if I really want to, and they are no longer using system resources waiting for me to get back to them for whatever idea I had in my head when I left them.

There’s a bunch of videos in this one. I’ve not watched them all. Like every link, every video represents at least one tab I closed today. Yes, I had a lot open. I always do. My last divestment of tabs was June last year. It was overdue.

Smol Web

Early Web Links (about): Early Web Links is a directory of personal homepages, fan sites, hobby pages, and other handcrafted corners of the internet. The kind of sites people used to make just because they wanted to, not because they had something to sell

A lot of blogs and personal pages

• blog.dotmavriq.life – someone’s personal website with some cool animated ASCII
• The personal homepage of Jonathan Lamothe, a programmer and free/libre software enthusiast. (Same page open in two tabs for some reason)
• The personal website of Sebastian Hädrich, Web developer, writer, filmmaker
• Hi, I’m Jamie Tanna – guess whose personal website this is…
  • Jamie Tanna’s blogroll
• Manton Reece’s blog – this is an interesting looking blog; I got a bit distracted reading it.
• Jeremy Felt’s web – Jeremy writes a longer note every week, shorter notes frequently, and blog posts from time to time.
• Chris Aldrich – Musings of a Modern Day Cyberneticist
• Sebastiaan Andeweg
• svemagie: pedestrian sociologist, mostly harmless
• Hey there! I’m Brad Frost.
• I’m Andy Bell and I try to make the web a better place
• Hi, I’m Anil Dash, a tech entrepreneur and writer trying to make the technology world more thoughtful, creative and humane.

Story and narrative

• Conspiraco – Scifi Short Story
• Star Trek or Star Wars?
• Writers, tell me about your WIP

Mental Health

• audhduk.org Assessment Pathways – guess what rabbit hole I took a deep dive down…

Huh, only one in this batch…

Philosophy and Religion

Last month, I tumbled down a rabbit hole of church-related questions for an essay idea about all the really hard and unanswerable questions. There was a bit of a theme.

• Contemporary Challenges to Eternal Punishment: An Essay By Christopher Morgan
• His Anger Is Not Forever: An essay by Rev. David Bast
• God is Love: 12 Life Transforming Verses from The Bible
• Daily verses, salvation
• How To Be Saved (I decided to document all the varied answers given because no two seem to entirely agree.

Code and Development

• PHP: sprintf
• Self-hosted Future Mail Service with n8n
• The GitHub profile of Sebastian Hädrich
• gpt-oss – ollama
• I hate the recent open-source rise
• API Handyman
• apisyouwonthate.com
• API Evangelist
• programming.dev

Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects, such as Git hosting (using Forgejo), Pages, CI/CD, and a Weblate instance.

JSON Resume is a community-driven open-source initiative to create a JSON-based standard for resumes. [See also]

Games and gaming

• Neon Vanguard – a browser-based game (there was a big pause while I played for a bit)
• Minecraft Server on Docker (Java Edition) – Working with mods and plugins
• itzg/minecraft-server

Essays about social media and related topics

• How I’d redesign Twitter (and why it won’t work)
• Naming things is hard – DNS for the Federated Web
• Mastodon on your own domain without hosting a server
• Playing with ActivityPub
• How I migrated my blog
• ActivityPub for WordPress and fediverse:creator
• Hosting my own ActivityPub server
• Setting Up My Blog within the Fediverse via ActivityPub
• Perspectives on Power Platform: Brutally honest and cheerfully sarcastic insights on Microsoft’s low-code and AI technology, business apps, and the business of software – written by Jukka Niiranen.
• A Comprehensive List of Everyone Still Using Facebook

Other

• https://micro.blog/discover
• Apparently, dev.to is a thing and I made a page.

AI

I expected more for this section, to be honest.

Are we done?

Not even remotely. This is just as many tabs as I got through before I ran out of steam.

I have a too-many-tabs problem.

What’s in your tabs waiting for you to get back to it?

Web writers, the AI has been trained on your public work, and it shows. You all have taught AI some truly terrible writing habits

HFY writers have taught AI it has to start stories with “Bob sat on the bridge of the Earth Ship Big Birtha”. So AI does just that, even when

I was listening to a narration today. I did not know it was AI, as the introductory narration was pretty decent by free-on-the-web standards. Then it just broke with that and had some character I didn’t care about sitting somewhere. It was so bad it made me stop to check the comments, which confirmed the story was by an AI.

You all have such bad writing habits that the AI has learned to be not even as good. This is a lesson to us all. With computers, you must remember rubbish in; rubbish out (to my US readers, garbage in; garbage out).

It is probably because the LLM industry is so desperate for content to train on that it does not distinguish between writers learning to write and writers having learned to tell great stories with good introductions.

As a result, AI writing makes all the writing mistakes.

Filing this under Writing on OpenMentions.