never mind about pingbacks?

I tried the plugin, but basically no one accepted my pingbacks!
Lots of failures like

ERROR: Pingback XML-RPC request failed for URL
https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/hoe-cultures-a-type-of-non-patriarchal-society/:
code=0 -

(Often with the further message "Invalid discovery target".)

Only the Cohen's d visualizer site (that I've linked to a couple
times) accepted—

-> Pingback notification sent for URL
   https://rpsychologist.com/d3/cohend/, endpoint response: Pingback
   was queued for processing:
   https://webmention.io/rpsychologist.com/webmention/1y4jNyZGrFbFD1-MUPwg

... but it doesn't show up on the site and when I click on the
processing link, it says "The source document does not have a link to
the target URL". But it does too—why couldn't it detect my link? (Is
that WordPress's problem, too?)

And then after all that waiting and failing (while my site was down),
it crashed without writing the cache file (to prevent it from
re-trying all that again on next publication), apparently because I
hadn't already created the cache directory—

  File "/home/mtsw/working/lib/python3.6/site-packages/linkbacks.py",
      line 59, in process_all_articles_linkbacks with
      open(config.cache_filepath, 'w+') as cache_file:
      FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory:
      'cache/pelican-plugin-linkbacks.json'

So, I guess I give up?

I notice that Compass Rose and Don't Worry About the Vase totally do
accept pingbacks! So maybe I should try this again sometime, but just
roll my own
(http://blog.mlindgren.ca/entry/2015/01/17/how-to-manually-send-a-pingback/)
to hit Zvi and Ben, rather than using this plugin, which obnoxiously
hit everything I've ever linked.