On likes, reposts, and bookmarks

2026-05-10

I received a nice email this week asking about my use of likes and bookmarks: how do I use them, and how are they different? The email made me realize I haven't been very consistent about my usage. Here's the mental model I have for them, and how I plan to use them from now onwards. The main difference between, for me, is their audience:

Likes are for the author. It's signal that indicates "I enjoyed this". Ideally likes should me unlisted —they don't show up in my feed, but can be seen by anyone who has the link. This allows me to send webmentions that can be easily verified by the target.

webmentions

Resposts are for my readers. This is something I want to share with people reading my blog; it says "I found this interesting enough to share with the world". They should be public.
Bookmarks are for me. I use them a lot on my phone, since my website is a progressive web app (PWA) that exposes the Web Share Target API. When I want to save something on my phone I can just share it to my blog, and by default it will create a private bookmark.

Web Share Target API

All of these 3 interactions will send webmentions, though bookmarks will likely fail because they're private. And while I do support private webmentions, I don't think they're widely supported enough to be useful.

private webmentions

Likes are somewhat special: if I like a post from a Wordpress.com blog, my blog will use their API to post a like on my behalf. I'm also working on a similar interaction with Mastodon accounts, but that's still work-in-progress.