I don’t want to get too deep in conspiracy theory, but Brad Enslen also posted a bit of history on Google’s tactics over the last decade here: https://ramblinggit.com/2018/08/when-the-social-silos-fall/#comment-451

And, actually, I don’t think it’s a conspiracy—I just think this can happen when you have 85,050 employees ‘optimizing’ the hell out of things.

I also wanted to leave a comment to say how cool it is to see the linked source code of your website—that you wrote your own Metalsmith Webmention code! I ducked away from Metalsmith because I didn’t want to add it. 👏