WebMention shenanigans
Who knew that being delusional ambitious enough to have a custom implementation of WebMentions would teach me a thing or two? /s
"If you build it, they will come" seems like an objectively neutral statement. That is, until you remember that all publicly usable protocols online can be abused as a vector for spam. That was my TIL in the middle of a discussion on WebMentions.
Luckily, there are detection strategies to combat this - one of the weirdest ones I saw involved training a simple classifier on genuine WebMentions you've received in the past. Not entirely sure how I feel about that? Kinda reminds me of folks using embeddings to surface related blog posts on their. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and all that.
But yes, spam is a problem that permeates everything, and the WebMention protocol isn't immune to it. Probably a good1 mental model to have.
But cynical.↩