An alternative to Webmentions for the Emacs Carnival

The Emacs Carnival collects submissions by hand: you write your post, then notify the host by comment, DM (Reddit, Mastodon...) or email. The IndieWeb solves this with Webmentions, but that requires your blog to send them and the host's blog to receive them, which most static Emacs blogs don't support. Org Social can do better: it is a federated social network, and it can be used to run a carnival without any extra software.

Publish or announce

Add a post to your social.org with the agreed tag emacs-carnival.

** 2026-08-05T10:00:00+0200
:PROPERTIES:
:TAGS: emacs-carnival
:END:

Check out [[https://my-blog.example/carnival-post/][my entry for this month's Emacs Carnival]].

That's it. No endpoint, no microformats, no notification step: one tagged post.

Read the submissions

Client

The first option is a client: org-social.el, or any other client, can filter the timeline by tag. Browse emacs-carnival and you are reading the carnival, no extra tooling involved.

JSON

For scripts and roundups, you can use the Org Social Relay API:

curl "https://relay.org-social.org/search/?tag=emacs-carnival"

It returns a paginated JSON list with the permalink of every submission.

RSS feed

You don't need an Org Social account to follow along. Subscribe from any feed reader:

https://relay.org-social.org/rss.xml?tag=emacs-carnival

Each item includes the author, the content and the permalink.

Conclusion

If you use a static blog and want to participate in the Emacs Carnival, consider using Org Social. It allows you to publish your submission with a simple tag, and others can easily read and follow the submissions through clients, the JSON API, or RSS feeds. This approach simplifies the process and makes it more accessible for everyone involved.