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> 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

> 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?

mro_name 5y ago
indeed – you might locally mirror comments from other webmention/activitypub etc. places and black/whitelist as usual.
AlchemistCamp 5y ago
If you don't want to sign up, then just lurk! 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.
- cuteboy19 5y ago
  It's the equivalent of sharing your bank account number with scammysitedotcom. Even if there are no security implications, sharing your entire financial history with any website is very privacy hostile.
  - 3np 5y ago
    Not necessarily. You should use a different account (preferably one with 0 transaction history, if no on-chain txes are needed) than your main financial account (and really, anyone not living paycheck to paycheck should have more than one of those in the first place. Cold/hot, have a separate one for any defi activities, use a new one for each L2, etc) 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)
  - AlchemistCamp 5y ago
    Based on your comment, I'm guessing you've never used Metamask or similar before. You really should check it out and see just how trivial creating a new wallet is. HD wallets lend themselves to this kind of UX.
- 3np 5y ago
  Got any links to such crypto sites where they’re used for auth for comments and social? It’s something I’ve been theorizing for years, would be great to see in the wild.
  - AlchemistCamp 5y ago
    https://bitclout.com https://bitclout.com
    - 3np 5y ago
      Cheers. It looks like it directly answers my question but not quite what I had in mind (pushes for linking Google account and email; requires phone number verification for the "free" signup airdrop to get the platform-specific coins required to participate; frankly looks quite sketchy and faux-decentralized)
      - AlchemistCamp 5y ago
        Oh, interesting. I never linked mine to Google or a phone. Maybe they changed the requirements for airdropping later on. 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.
tfsh 5y ago
Comment based systems built on top of existing platforms such as Matrix may be interesting. 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.
- mxuribe 5y ago
  100% THIS! I believe (hope!) that as more people understand that the matrix protocol is *not only* a chat protocol, but far more than that, then we will see many more different ideas flourish. There are already ideas for leveraging matrix for a blog...so why not for commenting, and other scenarios?
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  - anthropodie 5y ago
    This is already implemented https://cactus.chat/ https://cactus.chat/ Relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26371813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26371813
kingcharles 5y ago
The holy grail the Internet has been looking for since the Web was launched is a single-sign-on that doesn't suck in some fundamental way. It is definitely a huge friction point for commenting on a random blog that you might only visit one time. 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.
egypturnash 5y ago
This is a lot of what OpenID was designed for; use an identity managed by your site or someone you trust to sign in and own comments elsewhere.
theptip 5y ago
> Maybe a federated comment section? 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.
- clairity 5y ago
  > > "Maybe a federated comment section?" > "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. [0]: https://indieweb.org/webmention https://indieweb.org/webmention [1]: https://brid.gy/ https://brid.gy/
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    ActivityPub would work well for this, as there are several implementations of the standard, it can be self-hosted, and is already used in the comment sections of some video sites. I wonder if someone has already written an HTML embed that does this exact thing for arbitrary sites...
  - theptip 5y ago
    > that's what disqus wanted to be 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.
ecliptik 5y ago
You can use Mastodon for comments on static sites with a bit of javascript. https://joelchrono12.netlify.app/blog/how-to-add-mastodon-comments-to-jekyll-blog/ https://joelchrono12.netlify.app/blog/how-to-add-mastodon-co... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268
hiptobecubic 5y ago
What is wrong with discuss? Seems like exactly what you're asking for.
pjerem 5y ago
I comment on some blogs where I just need to enter an username, optionally my mail address and no account creation required at all. 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.
jrockway 5y ago
Back when blogs were a thing, my solution was to require all comments to be PGP signed. No spam, and the people commenting on my blog all liked that sort of thing, so it worked quite well. The software still exists: https://github.com/jrockway/angerwhale https://github.com/jrockway/angerwhale ("last commit: 15 years ago". holy shit.)
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> What I do not want is: > 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.
throwaway81523 5y ago
I post on various blogs with no sign-in. It's the usual wordpress comment thing where it asks for an email address but blatantly fake ones work. Typically the post goes into moderation the first few times you use a given email, then is auto approved. Federation otoh involves a centralized service which I'd rather avoid.
afiori 5y ago
for many blogs a high barrier to entry to comments is a priceless feature.

mro_name 5y ago

indeed – you might locally mirror comments from other webmention/activitypub etc. places and black/whitelist as usual.

AlchemistCamp 5y ago

If you don't want to sign up, then just lurk! 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.

cuteboy19 5y ago
It's the equivalent of sharing your bank account number with scammysitedotcom. Even if there are no security implications, sharing your entire financial history with any website is very privacy hostile.
- 3np 5y ago
  Not necessarily. You should use a different account (preferably one with 0 transaction history, if no on-chain txes are needed) than your main financial account (and really, anyone not living paycheck to paycheck should have more than one of those in the first place. Cold/hot, have a separate one for any defi activities, use a new one for each L2, etc) 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)
- AlchemistCamp 5y ago
  Based on your comment, I'm guessing you've never used Metamask or similar before. You really should check it out and see just how trivial creating a new wallet is. HD wallets lend themselves to this kind of UX.
3np 5y ago
Got any links to such crypto sites where they’re used for auth for comments and social? It’s something I’ve been theorizing for years, would be great to see in the wild.
- AlchemistCamp 5y ago
  https://bitclout.com https://bitclout.com
  - 3np 5y ago
    Cheers. It looks like it directly answers my question but not quite what I had in mind (pushes for linking Google account and email; requires phone number verification for the "free" signup airdrop to get the platform-specific coins required to participate; frankly looks quite sketchy and faux-decentralized)
    - AlchemistCamp 5y ago
      Oh, interesting. I never linked mine to Google or a phone. Maybe they changed the requirements for airdropping later on. 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.

tfsh 5y ago

Comment based systems built on top of existing platforms such as Matrix may be interesting. 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.

mxuribe 5y ago
100% THIS! I believe (hope!) that as more people understand that the matrix protocol is *not only* a chat protocol, but far more than that, then we will see many more different ideas flourish. There are already ideas for leveraging matrix for a blog...so why not for commenting, and other scenarios?
- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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- anthropodie 5y ago
  This is already implemented https://cactus.chat/ https://cactus.chat/ Relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26371813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26371813

kingcharles 5y ago

The holy grail the Internet has been looking for since the Web was launched is a single-sign-on that doesn't suck in some fundamental way. It is definitely a huge friction point for commenting on a random blog that you might only visit one time. 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.

egypturnash 5y ago

This is a lot of what OpenID was designed for; use an identity managed by your site or someone you trust to sign in and own comments elsewhere.

theptip 5y ago

> Maybe a federated comment section? 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.

clairity 5y ago
> > "Maybe a federated comment section?" > "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. [0]: https://indieweb.org/webmention https://indieweb.org/webmention [1]: https://brid.gy/ https://brid.gy/
- smoldesu 5y ago
  ActivityPub would work well for this, as there are several implementations of the standard, it can be self-hosted, and is already used in the comment sections of some video sites. I wonder if someone has already written an HTML embed that does this exact thing for arbitrary sites...
- theptip 5y ago
  > that's what disqus wanted to be 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.

ecliptik 5y ago

You can use Mastodon for comments on static sites with a bit of javascript. https://joelchrono12.netlify.app/blog/how-to-add-mastodon-comments-to-jekyll-blog/ https://joelchrono12.netlify.app/blog/how-to-add-mastodon-co... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268

hiptobecubic 5y ago

What is wrong with discuss? Seems like exactly what you're asking for.

pjerem 5y ago

I comment on some blogs where I just need to enter an username, optionally my mail address and no account creation required at all. 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.

jrockway 5y ago

Back when blogs were a thing, my solution was to require all comments to be PGP signed. No spam, and the people commenting on my blog all liked that sort of thing, so it worked quite well. The software still exists: https://github.com/jrockway/angerwhale https://github.com/jrockway/angerwhale ("last commit: 15 years ago". holy shit.)

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> What I do not want is: > 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.

throwaway81523 5y ago

I post on various blogs with no sign-in. It's the usual wordpress comment thing where it asks for an email address but blatantly fake ones work. Typically the post goes into moderation the first few times you use a given email, then is auto approved. Federation otoh involves a centralized service which I'd rather avoid.

afiori 5y ago

for many blogs a high barrier to entry to comments is a priceless feature.