About Open Mentions

OpenMentions is a project designed to use Webmentions and ActivityPub for topical content discovery. The site is organised along the lines of a hierarchy of topics going from broad to fine. This we call OpenTopic – the idea being that many sites could host the full collection of topics so that the loss of any one site is not the loss of all topics.

The intention is that this site should own nothing and that topic hierarchies are organic and discoverable.

OpenMentions is maintained by Matt.

How it currently works

Write something interesting. Mention a topic (with a link). Post it. Ping us. Everyone following the topic now knows about your interesting take on the topic.

Pick a topic you are interested in. Pick many. Subscribe to the RSS feed for the topic. You will see when others reply to or mention your chosen topic. They probably use ActivityPub and/or WebMention and you can reply right back. Thus are conversations born.

If you don’t see a topic you want just write something somewhere on the nearest best META page. This works the same way except the topic is the topic page. There, as a community, we can make plans. I have some ideas for making the topic directory distributable with more niche sub-topics maintained by people passionate about each topic.

The Open Topic Protocol

Matt has suggested a simple use of meta tags to make the directory structure machine-readable. Each topic page would list its topic, description, end-point meta, parent, and child topics as meta tags.

Something like this:

<meta name="opentopic:topic" content="My Topic"/>
<meta name="opentopic:description" content="My topic is all about..."/>
<meta name="opentopic:url" href="https://example.com/topics/my-topic"/>
<meta name="opentopic:meta" href="https://example.com/topics/my-topic/my-topic-meta"/>
<meta name="opentopic:parent" content="somewhere else" href="https://example.com/topics/"/>
<meta name="opentopic:childtopic" content="My First Subtopic" href="https://example.com/topics/my-topic/my-first-subtopic"/>
<meta name="opentopic:childtopic" content="My Next Subtopic" href="https://example.com/topics/my-topic/my-next-subtopic"/>
<meta name="opentopic:childtopic" content="My Other Subtopic" href="https://example.com/topics/my-topic/my-other-subtopic"/>

Meta Pages

Each topic should, ideally, have a meta page associated with it. This would allow discussion of the topic, description, and child topics, to be listed separately from the topic itself.

The WordPress plugin

Matt is working on a WordPress plugin that will generate the OpenTopic metadata as needed.

Over to you

OpenMentions is intended to be a jumping-off point for topic collectivism and not the silo of all topics. We accept feedback on topics, structure, and descriptions. We are on the lookout for proposed sites and pages for more specific and narrowly defined topics the use of which is entirely up to the community.

In short, OpenMention is an expression of the OpenTopic idea and not the owner of it.