2024/Düsseldorf/feedback

From IndieWeb

Comments section for personal websites was a session at IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf 2024.

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

See Also