Thinking about Planets and Challenges

Earlier today, at the special Transatlantic Bonus Homebrew Website Club, we continued a discussion on trying a community challenge to create content, similar to some of what micro.blog does with their photo challenges.

One of the stumbling blocks was discovery on this, being distributed, how you can essentially follow people who are participating.

One proposal involved creating a site you log into using IndieAuth and then that would be how you’d join.

I started contemplating simple webmentions. The same way you RSVP to an event…you should be able to create a page for a challenge and have it receive webmentions, which would generate the feed.

So, that is what I’ve been contemplating all afternoon since. The page would work like an old-style planet. A planet is a site that aggregates feeds from a variety of sources with a particular theme or community.

Using webmentions as a publishing avenue is what Brid.gy does. So, there are a few ways I thought this could work.

  1. Like the way Brid.gy does it, the post would be marked up with a u-syndication property, which would trigger a webmention to the page, but instead of it being seen as a comment, it would add it as an h-entry in a feed people could follow. To prevent abuse, there could be the same types of vouches/moderation you’d otherwise use. If you wanted to ‘take down’ a post, you’d use the webmention delete method.
  2. This would be the same, except using the u-category properties instead of u-syndication. So, why is this a thought? Because you are tagging it, but just linking it to a tag on another site. The argument for this vs u-syndication is that the syndication in this case is entirely at the discretion of the receiver…also it the URL is scoped to the feed, not to the individual post.

In both of these, it seems like a relatively easy thing to have your webmention receiver interpret this markup by generating an h-feed, either of reposts of the post, or a simple feed with just URLs to the individual posts.

This is something that could be easily built into any site that has webmention capabilities with a minimum of additional code.

So, have at it, what am I missing here?