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> 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 co

> 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.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  Yeah because such a system should be a standardized layer of the web not something controlled by a single company. The underlying authentication should probably be stored on a distributed ledger or set by the government. I’ve long thought that social security numbers will end up as a predecessor to this as the government is already the one entity that knows everything about us (and you could still have private browsing that didn’t use this layer.)
  - AlchemistCamp 5y ago
    > The underlying authentication should probably be stored on a distributed ledger or set by the government. I'm sure authoritarian governments would love this setup, but don't think rights activists or dissidents would.

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.
edgyquant 5y ago
Yeah because such a system should be a standardized layer of the web not something controlled by a single company. The underlying authentication should probably be stored on a distributed ledger or set by the government. I’ve long thought that social security numbers will end up as a predecessor to this as the government is already the one entity that knows everything about us (and you could still have private browsing that didn’t use this layer.)
- AlchemistCamp 5y ago
  > The underlying authentication should probably be stored on a distributed ledger or set by the government. I'm sure authoritarian governments would love this setup, but don't think rights activists or dissidents would.