The idea that every blog comment system should be run by a multi-billion dollar company like Facebook, Reddit or YC is fundamentally at odds with the open web.
Agree but don't you think there needs to be a better way at handling comments on web. What I do not want is:
1. sign up on every blog just to comment
2. something like discuss either
Maybe a federated comment section?
I often go from just reading the posts to reading posts and comments to talking about the site elsewhere to signing up and just posting there.
Having used federated comment systems, they've been a complete loss. They increase page load times, lead to more low-quality drive-by comments and then inevitably eventually start trying to load their ads on my page.
The one exception is crypto sites, where people just log in with their wallet creds. Those are pseudonymous, shared across sites and have very frictionless UX. That would be a highly polarizing choice for a non-crypto-focused site, though.
Just like you may not have the same email for job applications and dodgy e-commerce, or bring all your cash and cards with you in a purse to the nightclub.
(GP did say “shared across sites”, which should be a very deliberate decision and not the default. UX needs to improve to have better privacy by default. I could imagine Metamask defaulting to generating and connecting a unique address for each domain, requiring manually selecting accounts to have them shared)
It's not that centralized though. I know of multiple projects that ran custom nodes of it for their own front-ends / customizations of the network. That's something that you just couldn't do with Twitter.
The project did seem a bit like a quick cash grab though, and I'm not sure it will ever return to the peak it hit last spring.
For want of a better word there's a "misconception" that the Matrix protocol can only be used for chat apps, but instead it's defined a fully open, federated and encrypted event transmission service which can be used for any type of multiuser application.
Relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26371813
I totally agree that you shouldn't outsource your blog comments to someone else though, because what happens when Facebook decides their commenting system isn't profitable anymore and kills the product? Half the content on your web site suddenly vanishes.
I’d love to see this. For a long time I’ve been wishing for some sort of social overlay on top of the web - why can’t I comment with my community on existing articles? Make in-line annotations and share them? See my friends’ annotations as I read articles? Etc.
This could be a browser plug-in or perhaps an iframe over the original content. It could even be implemented as a protocol that browsers support (“go to your configured overlay server(s) and load content for the page you are on”) if it were successful enough. This sort of feature gets better the more streamlined and “baked in” it is.
> "I’d love to see this. For a long time I’ve been wishing for some sort of social overlay on top of the web - why can’t I comment with my community on existing articles?"
that's what disqus wanted to be, and we've largely rejected that because of the privacy and anonymity issues with disqus.
a year and a half ago, i did a bit of a dive into webmentions[0] and bridgy[1] as a federated alternative, but that doesn't seem to have taken off yet.
I see what you mean, but perhaps the key difference I see is that if this is a federated protocol, then you bring your own identity network (for example, someone in another sub-thread mentioned that Matrix could support this usecase). Presumably FB would implement this protocol if it was popular enough, and replicate FB comments, but the cipherpunks could use a Matrix server or whatever privacy-preserving method they prefer. By promoting it to the level of a protocol you can get multiple implementations/networks, but without forcing the communities to be un-discoverable to each other. (E.g. I might be fine with everybody seeing my public post, but prefer not to have every website capture my Disqus ID by virtue of me viewing the page. A bridged privately-run overlay could meet that requirement.)
> webmentions[0] and bridgy[1]
Perfect, thanks - that looks like at least the next evolutionary step towards what I'm envisioning.
I think that until native browser-support is added (if it ever gets there), bridging posts back to "non-protocol-speakers" by posting comments to the blog itself is probably the smart move. That way you don't split your community. But I'd love to see a world where the comments and content are disaggregated, so that I can just filter out the garbage "public" comments, or participate in them, depending on my mood.
I'm sure authoritarian governments would love this setup, but don't think rights activists or dissidents would.
https://joelchrono12.netlify.app/blog/how-to-add-mastodon-co...
I don’t know how those blogs manage spam but there is just none. So it’s totally doable.
An option I see is to just store a random token in a cookie and require pre-publish moderation for the first n posts from this token.
Your regular commenters are probably just using the same 1 or 2 devices to read your blog.
The software still exists: https://github.com/jrockway/angerwhale ("last commit: 15 years ago". holy shit.)
> 1. sign up on every blog just to comment
> 2. something like discuss either
So, you want the blog commenting system we already have? It's not common for a blog to require an account before you can comment.
And it uses the most popular federated protocol, so most users won't have to create a n ew account.
Also spam is not a problem, comments stay private.
It's probably why you wrote this comment rather than just emailing someone.
The more obvious solution is OAuth (or OpenID Connect), and there are plenty of providers that aren't Apple, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, or GitHub.
Might violate ToS though