Web mentions and reply by email? The first is easy thanks to webmention.io, but the second is very involved and requires a public email inbox setup.

Fun fact: fetching favicons from various domains is a dark art. Might seem trivial at first, but it’s very complicated. A simple request for a favicon.ico will net strange returns — like serving a text file as a favicon.ico.

Better to leverage a browser which excels at interpreting favicons or contact a CDN of a major search engine. Make sure to cache the results.

• https://icons.duckduckgo.com/ip1/en.wikipedia.org.ico
• https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=en.wikipedia.org

The space of software hosting forges is sizeable. Most techy people know about GitHub and GitLab but many software forges exist (if considering the entire world). Here’s a few of note.

1. NotABug: Based on Gogs.
2. SourceHut: Suite of free software development tools built from the ground up.
3. Codeberg: Based on Gitea.
4. SourceForge: Mainstream software hosting.
5. Radicle: Decentralized on the service layer (discussions/issues). Git itself is distributed and decentralized.
6. Savannah: Suite of software development tools from GNU.

The GUID is an interesting element in the RSS specification — yeah another post about RSS. You could hash the content of a post and commit to the idea that it shouldn’t change.

If a post changes, then the GUID would provide a trail of edits, with the drawback of possibly resurfacing an old post. This article from 15 years ago explores what feed readers did at the time when given a link and/or guid.