2024/Düsseldorf/feedback
Comments section for personal websites was a session at IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf 2024.
- Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/feedback
Participants
Notes
- Nikkin + Matthias are facilitating this session
- Nikkin: When I write content on my blog, I can not get people to tell me about my content unless I put a comments section below. I know that WP has a default comment section, but what if I write plain HTML and I want some idea of having a comments section.
- Small nuance from Nikkin: Each comment should be owned by the person who is commenting. If someone comes to comment, they should be able to delete their comment if they want to.
- Ask: are there existing technologies that could be used? (David mentioned Webmention)
- Mathias: The next step if you have that implemented -- that others can comment on your site -- how do we prevent duplicates if they both use different protocols and still be able to delete the content if they want to.
- Webmention: A system where one site can tell another site that it has linked to it.
- Write something on your site, send a Webmention, then the other site can show it.
- Lots of people have iterated on Webmention to support rich commenting; people can send notices to delete a version of a comment.
- Webmention
- Ryan Barrett has a tool called https://brid.gy that scans sites for mentions and send a Webmention to your website.
- Webmention also supports deleting: if you mention someone and your post shows as a comment, if you delete the post, it will tell the Webmention endpoint to delete the content.
- You can use https://webmention.io to receive Webmentions and webmention.js to receive mentions.
- Q: What about a user on the internet who doesn't have a personal website?
- That's where bridging is useful. Someone can use a tool that they want and use Webmention as the way to receive them. It allows someone to post a comment without having to authenticate with your website.
- lostfocus.de: Removed comment form a while ago. Occasionally some people would reach out to ask why there was not a comment form.
- Idea: close comment form after a period of time to prevent spam. You can still send Webmentions, though. https://gregorlove.com/2024/01/reducing-native-comment-spam/
- Another way of doing comments: ask people to send you emails.
- If you only support email, the conversation is private; it can't be a group conversation.
- A comic strip for personal website comments.
- James: how can we be more creative in how to show comments?
- masonry layout
- speech bubbles
- swipe to see different comments
- Now onto protocols
- Brid.gy can potentially bring duplicate content because of different protocols
- Matthias: supports AP and Webmentions. If someone mentions me on AP and uses Brid.gy, I get AP and Brid.gy comments.
- Question: where do I send a response to the content?
- Scenarios where there are duplicates:
- Brid.gy and AP (although ideally this should not be a problem; it isn't clear to this transcriptionist (James!)) how to document that)
- AP and Webmention
- Aggregate feeds and AP or Webmention
- Prior documentation on deduplication: deduplication
- Problems: to where do I reply? Example: AP or Mastodon?
- This is a problem on WP because comments are not permalinked.
- Tantek: in a Federated system -- like AP or Webmention -- comments and replies should have a permalink should be to the original post, not to any fragment on the original post. The date should be the link.
- ... add notes