Hey sorry it's John again. Do you know about Webmention? It's sort of like whatever "Trackbacks" were—you advertise an endpoint in the metadata of your webpage, and when another webpage links to that page, the author of that page can choose to ping your webmention endpoint and let you know. You can then publish that link on the original page if you want to, like it's a comment, or you can just treat it like a notification that someone had something to say to or about something you said. It's neat!
There's a free hosted service called Webmention.io that allows you to receive webmentions on a static site. They all get collected for you in a third-party interface that is also available as a private RSS feed.
Sending webmentions is left as an excercise for the reader! You can absolutely do this manually after you publish something, which is probably the easiest way to get started. Personally, when I'm posting stuff, there aren't that many outgoing links, and fewer still to other people's personal sites that I think might be listening for webmention calls, so it's not so tedious to just send them out with cURL (or httpie[https://httpie.io/cli] which is like cURL but more pleasant if you're mostly making HTTP requests) but I bet somebody has made a tool that accepts a URL to your post and will detect and make Webmention calls on your behalf. If that tool doesn't exist, maybe someone should make it! Maybe it'll be you! Maybe it'll be me.
If you want to get this set up in a real quick and dirty way, webmention.app has a mode where you can just plug your RSS feed into it and have it automatically send mentions to any links you include on your site. It's so easy! Give it a shot!
