Privacy and Webmentions
| 1 min read
Following my recent post about not checking Mastodon, a reader raised an interesting privacy concern regarding Webmentions. They explained that they had stopped using Webmentions altogether because Fediverse users often don't realise - or explicitly consent to - their replies being republished on an external blog.
This surprised me, as I'd never considered that Webmentions could be a privacy concern.
To my mind, a public post on an open platform like Mastodon is precisely that: public. The Fediverse is decentralised by design. When you reply to someone, your message doesn't remain isolated on your home instance; it federates across countless independent servers. Pulling a public reply onto kevquirk.com via a Webmention bridge is conceptually no different from fosstodon.org relaying a reply originally posted on mastodon.social.
Unless the concern is about deletion persistence (e.g. cached mentions remaining if a post is deleted), I struggle to see where the privacy violation lies when republishing content that was broadcast publicly to the open web in the first place.
Am I missing a subtlety here? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Subscribe for more!
You don't have to keep coming back here to read my latest waffle. There's a couple of ways to subscribe to receive updates whenever I publish new content.