Good point. I was aware Linkbacks existed, and had tried to read that article before, but never really understood why they were supposed to be useful. Especially in the way they manifest as visual clutter on my Wordpress blog.
But I can see now that they are potentially a way for distributed conversation to happen (with a lot of work on building better UX norms). I wonder what the pros and cons are compared to ActivityPub.
I wonder that too. ActivityPub/ActivityStreams seems really interesting, but I haven’t found a good roll-up of (1) the problems it was designed to solve and (2) the design philosophy of this solution. Once I understand what’s possible vs. what Mastodon’s implementation of ActivityPub can do, I hope to be able to answer the question: Can an alternate implementation be less of a nightmare to scale, or is that intrinsic to the protocol?
But I can see now that they are potentially a way for distributed conversation to happen (with a lot of work on building better UX norms). I wonder what the pros and cons are compared to ActivityPub.