Previously^1 I asked "How should we @ someone [on the #IndieWeb]?" & suggested we use @-domain. With some web spelunking, the earliest such use I found was 2013-03-26 (~10y ago!) by @eschnou.com, maybe^2 the first #siteToSite #federated #atMention!

 "And my first ever #indieweb pingback goes to @tantek.com, @aaronparecki.com and @waterpigs.co.uk ! Yes, I can now federate... well.. if I can manage to get it to interop :-)"

Though the original post disappeared in a site update (and was unarchived), you can see it on the Internet Archive of @eschnou.com’s #IndieWeb tag page: https://web.archive.org/web/20130609045145/http://eschnou.com/tag/indieweb#2013Mar26

At the time, Barnaby (@waterpigs.co.uk) did confirm receiving that @-mention on his site via Pingback (this was before Webmention was a thing^3): https://waterpigs.co.uk/notes/1199/ (https://twitter.com/BarnabyWalters/status/316664943820812289)

@eschnou.com also asked in the IndieWeb chat if @aaronparecki.com had gotten his @-domain mention: https://chat.indieweb.org/2013-03-26#t1364333721000000
You can see at the bottom of that chat log that he did.

I myself started using @-domain in my posts ~4 years later in a 2017 reply: https://tantek.com/2017/345/t1/aaronpk-paid-thanks (https://twitter.com/t/status/940382393097228288) though only when the same person controlled the domain and the Twitter @-name of the first part of the domain name before the "." (which was/is not many people. Workaround: use other @-domain mentions in posts after the POSSE tweet cut-off).

I think that was my earliest use because two days after that post I added @-domain auto-linking to the https://tantek.com/github/cassis (@cassisjs) "auto_link" function https://github.com/tantek/cassis/commit/0e8e6270c0a3b600423c283f59b5d22c3648d59a (https://twitter.com/cassisjs/status/941107922318381057), likely having already tested it in production on my own site with that post.

I’m still #testingInProduction the updates noted in ^3, notably "https:" for all @-mentions (@-name @-domain @-@) and hope to merge them into the repo soon. Aside: both that and the #testInProduction hashtag have hilarious Twitter results^4.

Does anyone know of any other auto-linkers that support linking @-domain in plain text to an https URL of that domain? Extra internet points if they also support @-@ auto-linking.

This is day 14 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb #100Days.

← Day 13: https://tantek.com/2023/013/t1/indieweb-home-internet
→ 🔮

^1 Day 11: https://tantek.com/2023/011/t1/indieweb-evolving-at-mention
^2 I’m curious if StatusNet, OStatus, or OpenMicroBlogging had an explicit syntax for site-to-site @-mentions, whether any of them resembled @-domain, and is there evidence of their earliest @-mention usage (if any) still visible on the web (or Internet Archive) cc: @evanp.me (@evan@prodromou.pub)
^3 https://tantek.com/2023/012/t1/six-years-webmention-w3c
^4 Navigating to Twitter hashtag results left as an exercise to the reader, to provide a deliberate soft barrier to a potential doomscrolling trap.