Originally I thought about giving this thread a more general title like “indie web comment options,” but then I figured let’s cut to the chase: I want to understand the prevalence of Mastodon links being used at the end of indie web posts in place of a comment section.
Here are some posts about using Mastodon as an alternative to a comment section:
Let me know if you know of more. I’m interested in collecting these for my Useful Links page.
Anyway, I expect that throwing in a Mastodon link is just considered “easier,” even though Mastodon replies have some pretty significant downsides if you ask me. The Murteza Yesil post also goes into some of the hurdles and complications with alternatives.
So my question is… what would it take to make any of the alternatives easier? Is this just an intractable problem, or is there something else that could be done here?
For my own blog I investigated activitypub and indieweb integration for comments and decided not to bother with either.
The host/guest relationship described in the osteophage post is what you want for blog comments, and if activitypub can’t support that then it will never be a good fit.
I still don’t understand enough about all that stuff to be able to make a good decision about how to integrate comments on my site. I’m not even sure I want that. That’s why I link to the fediverse post where I announce my new blogpost, as well as give an e-mail address under every blog post. The fediverse comments, likes, and boosts are not displayed on my site.
What would my criteria be for a comment section:
I do not want an outside service display things on my site. Things that are hosted in a “cloud” somewhere.
I would probably want to self host, but that is something for a future of unknown distance. Because I have 0 experience in self hosting anthything.
I want that service to not rely on my knowing and understanding technobabble. I need plain English for dummies. That’s probably the biggest problem right now. And even if I try to find out what words mean, I struggle to wrap my head around it. So it’s probably more a me problem than a them problem.
So, for the time being, readers who want to comment on my blog either have to click through to the fedi, or send me an e-mail.
Personally, I use bearblog for blogging and it doesn’t have built-in comments. I’m not even sure if there’s a way to add them. This is fine by me. I started this blog mainly for myself so engagement is not a big focus for me. I even disabled the “upvote” button on my posts in my previous layout! I’ve also seen people include their e-mail address in more “interactive” posts such as questions or in general.
From what I understand, it creates a standalone comments page you can link to from a post.
More generally, I think the issue with comments systems for platforms that don’t already have them is that setting them up is a bit more technical and I can see how documentation might sound confusing. Back in like 2009, I actually used disqus (or whatever it’s called) to add comments to a tumblr I made, and it wasn’t too bad fwiw. It was mostly just annoying but not difficult.
I don’t like the option of responding to stuff on Mastodon, though. I’m not on Mastodon and don’t particularly want to be, and I’m not going to make a whole account just for this. I haven’t seen this in the wild, though, fortunately.
There’s a container so it was fairly easy to self-host. I hit a little snag because they don’t provide a container for ARM, but podman can run emulate other architectures.
I hit another snag because Access-Control-Allow-Origin wasn’t set on the JS file I needed to include, and I fixed that with nginx config on my host.
Thanks for reporting back! I don’t actually know what most of that means, so it sounds like using Cusdis would be well beyond me. It’s unfortunate how independent options for comment sections seem to be so demanding.
Personally I think that not having comments at all far outweighs the benefits of having a comments section. Since day one I pushed all interactions through direct emails and it was by far the best decision.
If someone wants to leave a comment on my site it means one of two things:
They have thoughts and they want to tell those thoughts to me in which case a direct email is a far superior way to do that.
They have thoughts and they want to add to the conversation in a more generic way, and in that case they should not write a comment but rather they should post on their own site and then send me the link.
Now, a comment section might also generate some organic discussion but the chance of that happening is minuscule compared to what is actually happening in reality.
Plus a comment section also means moderation, means having to decide if someone has crossed the line, means dealing with spam. All those problems are gone when you embrace emails and potentially chat messages (some people do send me messages on apple messages rather than emails)
That’s how I see it. And moving everything over to social media is a terrible solution imo because social media is fundamentally flawed as a social system.