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 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.