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There are several questionable claims and viewpoints in this post. This is one I felt worthy of addressing because information to the contrary is not widely kn
by cxr 4y ago
There are several questionable claims and viewpoints in this post. This is one I felt worthy of addressing because information to the contrary is not widely known:
> RSS is one-way publishing; there is no way for content creators and their audience to interact
Not true. Feeds support a byline for each post item. This typically contains the author's name. You can, though, also include an email address there. For readers that are also mail clients, those readers* can allow the user to "reply to" a given feed item (in the same way that your mail client lets you reply to a message sitting in your mailbox). I know of very few feeds, however, where people actually include a reply-to address. It's a network/ecosystem problem.
* or any other reader that wishes to allow invoking the user's default mail client
- pornel 4y agoAnd every entry has a link, so users can follow it if they want more content/interactivity/contact.
- Ajedi32 4y agoThat's really interesting, though I don't think that private 1:1 messages are what most people have in mind when they think of interaction between content creators and their audience. I think the simplest way of adding a more traditional "replies" feature to RSS would be to have some way of indicating an RSS <item> is a reply to another RSS item in a different feed. Then maybe add some sort of POST endpoint where anyone can request that a reply be linked back to from the author's post, and there you go: a fully decentralized comment system.
- garrickvanburen 4y ago<comments> ?
- Ajedi32 4y agoPretty much, except the existing spec for that provides no way for people to post or read comments from the RSS reader; you have to go to an external URL.
- garrickvanburen 4y agoOh. It’s been a while since I’ve worked with RSS2, IIRC some of the feeds I worked 14 yrs ago with were comment feeds off a given blog post. Maybe those implementations weren’t true to spec.
- derekzhouzhen 4y agoI don't think RSS is the right place for this kind of interaction. There are many ways to include commenting such as HN, or (shameless plug) https://roastidio.us https://roastidio.us
- Ajedi32 4y agoWith this feature though HN comments on articles could become 1st class citizens inside your favorite RSS reader. Just tag each item in https://hnrss.org/item?id=32140774 https://hnrss.org/item?id=32140774 as a reply to the linked article, POST them to the feed's listed comment submission endpoint, and there you go, HN comments are now integrated with your blog's decentralized comment system.
- Zak 4y agoI agree RSS is not designed work comments in mind and probably shouldn't be redesigned to support them. ActivityPub is a more suitable, federated way to support comments.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- skybrian 4y agoIt seems like the simplest way is to put a link at the end of the post that goes to a regular web page that has the comments. At that point, you need to decide if users need to log in or not. Often, requiring a login of some sort is a good anti-spam measure, but it also excludes some people. Still, if requiring a login is good enough for Hacker News, it's probably good enough for your blog. Why do you want to hear from anonymous posters anyway?