Link Versus Reply Contexts

The indieweb community makes a distinction between link contexts and reply contexts. The first is what you show when you embed a link, like a preview of what the link contains. The second is what you show when you embed a link with the intention of replying to it,

In the past I couldn’t really see a reason to distinguish between these cases. I would show the title and description in both cases. Lately, I’ve been reconsidering my opinion, and I think there’s a bit more nuance here than I originally thought.

In particular, a reply context is what you show when you’re responding to something - or, much more often, someone, and in that sense it’s more about the “who” than the “what”. And it’s usually in the context of the Indieweb. You’d almost never post a reply to a newspaper article, for example; it would usually be a like or even just a note with a link and some commentary.

So in a reply context, the author of the post is front and center. In a link context, you might focus more on the site that the article came from.

But is that always true? What if the link in a link context is from the Indieweb? In that case, maybe you still want to focus on the author.

So maybe the rule here is: IndieWeb link previews focus on the author, since the IndieWeb is people-focused, and a non-IndieWeb link focuses on the site. And once we come to that conclusion, the difference between link and reply contexts once again collapses and the preview difference become more about IndieWeb versus non-IndieWeb.