I came across an interesting post by Ms. Tracy Durnell on her personal blog supporting the idea of Webmention support for Substack. She explained the case in favor:
I am concerned that with all the features Substack is adding — chat, podcasting, internal mentions, internal recommendations — they are becoming more and more of an insulated silo. An open web benefits all users, but it doesn’t necessarily benefit silo owners who want to keep all traffic internal. However, because Substack’s revenue is based on subscriptions rather than advertising, I’m hopeful they’d be receptive to the opportunity for discovery and engagement that Webmentions could foster.
Tracy Durnell
Having just published an article wherein I questioned whether Substack’s new Notes feature was a harbinger of the platform becoming increasingly siloed, I second Ms. Durnell’s sentiment with respect to hoping that Substack considers supporting Webmentions. Webmention is a decentralized standard for site-to-site communications, essentially treating a link to an article as a comment (I discussed in brief in a post on IndieWeb and RSS). They are neat, albeit not-much used. One reason I would like to see Substack support Webmentions is because we support Webmentions and have been linked to in a couple of interesting Substack articles. Moreover, I follow some Substack blogs via RSS and would find it useful to be able to comment on interesting Substack entries from the comfort of The New Leaf Journal. As a more general matter, I hope that Substack remains relatively open from a reader’s perspective.