Here’s a great article that implements reading webmentions natively in hugo. There’s always a soul out there who has tried what you’re thinking about.

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 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.