Today I learned about Webmentions and webmention.io. Webmention is a standard for federated communication between servers, allowing one server to indicate to another that it has published content with a link to (aka “mentioned”) some content on the target server. This is standardized so that it does not require a single owner or centralized service (such as Twitter or FB) to facilitate the communication or store the data, each server can do it itself.
Webmention.io is a service that can facilitate webmentions for any website, and I don’t fail to see the irony there. However, since webmentions are a standard, you would not be locked in to a single service, and you could implement your own sending/receiving code yourself at some future date. The best use case for webmention.io that I can see is the ability to receive and display mentions on a static website, where the service provides the necessary hooks for the webmention implementation, and your site remains a collection of static assets.