4 ms·

This is the best thing for RSS in a long time. What I miss though for RSS streams is commenting. 'Nobody' reads the articles on link aggregators, (*e: just the

by s3000 4y ago

This is the best thing for RSS in a long time. What I miss though for RSS streams is commenting. 'Nobody' reads the articles on link aggregators, (*e: just the comments). In a way, RSS is a link aggregator that limits its user base to the ones who read and don't comment. I am wondering what will happen if RSS readers find a way to share comments on posts. Maybe ActivityPub makes that possible. The only service of which I am aware that allows for comments on RSS is https://linklonk.com/ https://linklonk.com/ . Are there other approaches to bring comments to RSS streams? Maybe ooh.directory can use ActivityPub to allow commenting and voting on the entries. Comments on HN are great to check for problems with an article. That should also be true for comments about entire blogs.

rambambram 4y ago
> What I miss though for RSS streams is commenting. >In a way, RSS is a link aggregator that limits its user base to the ones who read and don't comment. I share this view. What do you think about a concept wherein a collection of followed feeds is presented in a timeline with the possibility to 'comment' with an email form? It will look like a regular comment textarea under some blogpost, but the commenting is done by email. The reaction isn't immediately visible under the blogpost (if at all) and therefor everything works humanly slow. But there's also no signup required, so it's more anonymous and openly accessible.
- s3000 4y ago
  >a collection of followed feeds is presented in a timeline with the possibility to 'comment' From my point of view, that's the future. Using mail is dangerous because it is another protocol, and it still requires account management because nobody will post to arbitrary pages with their primary mail address. That said, mail still has the potential to become the standard for social networks. Why should comments not be immediately visible? People can already write mails to authors. That's not what builds momentum. The interesting part is the interaction of the audience. We can build social interaction that improves direct human interaction in the same way that cars improve human movement. I wouldn't focus on slowing it down but on speeding up the filtering so that it is easy to find the individually preferred audience among all possible reactions to an url. The difficult part is to maintain group identities and momentum when all comments are dissected and re-aggregated. It's problematic to manage comments on the server of a blog post. This creates silos and echo chambers because it is difficult to find the comments of a user on other blogs and creators rarely allow their audience to create their own posts. Newspapers with their comment sections already offer that protocol. We have Facebook because newspapers missed out on coming together and offering the missing parts. What is missing at Linklonk, apart from opening up to ActivityPub, is long-term conversations on posts. On aggregators like HN, there is an audience at the top comments. Hardly anybody writes comments on old posts. To make comments on off-momentum articles worthwhile, it would be necessary to have a notification function that is triggered not only by replies but also by new comments when they pass a threshold.
  - lonk11 4y ago
    LinkLonk supports comment notifications for any item that you have subscribed to. You get notified through browser notifications and email. And you can mute/follow individual branches of the comment tree. Details: https://linklonk.com/item/396040801387544576 https://linklonk.com/item/396040801387544576 There is definitely more to improve, but I'd like to see more use of the comments section first to know what needs to be improved next. As for ActivityPub, I just saw https://go-fed.org/ https://go-fed.org/ on HN and it looks like a good fit to add ActivityPub support to LinkLonk (since it is written in Go). There are multiple ways to do it, so let me know how you would like to see it working. Do you want to follow posts of Mastodon users on LinkLonk (similar to how it shows you RSS content)? Do you want Mastodon users to be able to follow your channels on LinkLonk (e.g. @s3000@linklonk.com)?
    - s3000 4y ago
      >LinkLonk supports comment notifications ... can mute/follow individual branches Great! >how you would like to see it working That's a difficult question. My primary focus is on the availability of discussions. Nevertheless, integrating LinkLonk in both directions with Mastodon should help with growth. There doesn't seem to be an algorithmic timeline, which LinkLonk could provide. Establishing LinkLonk as an integrated RSS Reader and ActivityPub Client could attract a bigger user base that makes calculating suggestions easier. What ActivityPub can bring to new social networks like LinkLonk is the ability to share the comment section with various other providers. E.g. RSS readers or annotating browser plugins can pool their comments in one place to have an active discussion even if each tool has a small user number. However, pooling discussions is generally avoided: 1. When there is a dupe on HN, the discussion in the old submission is not continued. 2. There exist various aggregators like lobste.rs, reddit.com/programming or tildes.net, that almost discuss the same articles as HN, but they are different communities. 3. Twitter and Mastodon could pool the replies to posts of the same url, but they don't. The trivial approach for LinkLonk would be an integration with lemmy.ml and all Mastodon posts that discuss the same URL. That way, most posts would come with a discussion and LinkLonk instantly had a vibrant community. With the pool-avoiding behavior in mind, some adjustments could be needed but I haven't figured out what that could be.
mawise 4y ago
> I am wondering what will happen if RSS readers find a way to share comments on posts The IndieWeb community is focused on this with Social Readers[1] and Webmentions[2]. The core idea is your reader also ties into your own published feed, so you can make a comment right in your reader that publishes the comment to your own feed and sends a webmention to the original article so they know about it. Barriers to entry are still kinda high (much like making a website 25 years ago) so any adoption should lead to a better signal/noise ratio. Unless it becomes popular enough for bots to start spamming the webmentions... [1]: https://indieweb.org/social_reader https://indieweb.org/social_reader [2]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention https://indieweb.org/Webmention
- account42 4y ago
  Webmention depends on the original source to link back to those comments for discovery though, right? I think perhaps a better approach would be a way to comment on any URL and see comments from other users (or communities) that you have subscribed to. That way the author of the content being discussed is not in a position to limit the discussion to what they approve of and you can discuss things that are not even opted into this system. Ideally this system would also be integrated into browsers you you can see and write comments even when visiting a URL directly.
  - mawise 4y ago
    Thats exactly what my vision is for comments on Haven[1]. Without webmentions, you're just telling your friends/followers what you think which enables private comments/conversations on public content. [1]:https://havenweb.org https://havenweb.org
msephton 4y ago
I at the end of each of my blog posts I include a link to the tweet where I announced the post. Works well for me. If Twitter dies I guess I'll have to swap them out at some point. Alternatively, you could use something like a Discus embed for comments but I didn't want to have one more thing to manage.

by s3000 4y ago

rambambram 4y ago

> What I miss though for RSS streams is commenting. >In a way, RSS is a link aggregator that limits its user base to the ones who read and don't comment. I share this view. What do you think about a concept wherein a collection of followed feeds is presented in a timeline with the possibility to 'comment' with an email form? It will look like a regular comment textarea under some blogpost, but the commenting is done by email. The reaction isn't immediately visible under the blogpost (if at all) and therefor everything works humanly slow. But there's also no signup required, so it's more anonymous and openly accessible.

s3000 4y ago
>a collection of followed feeds is presented in a timeline with the possibility to 'comment' From my point of view, that's the future. Using mail is dangerous because it is another protocol, and it still requires account management because nobody will post to arbitrary pages with their primary mail address. That said, mail still has the potential to become the standard for social networks. Why should comments not be immediately visible? People can already write mails to authors. That's not what builds momentum. The interesting part is the interaction of the audience. We can build social interaction that improves direct human interaction in the same way that cars improve human movement. I wouldn't focus on slowing it down but on speeding up the filtering so that it is easy to find the individually preferred audience among all possible reactions to an url. The difficult part is to maintain group identities and momentum when all comments are dissected and re-aggregated. It's problematic to manage comments on the server of a blog post. This creates silos and echo chambers because it is difficult to find the comments of a user on other blogs and creators rarely allow their audience to create their own posts. Newspapers with their comment sections already offer that protocol. We have Facebook because newspapers missed out on coming together and offering the missing parts. What is missing at Linklonk, apart from opening up to ActivityPub, is long-term conversations on posts. On aggregators like HN, there is an audience at the top comments. Hardly anybody writes comments on old posts. To make comments on off-momentum articles worthwhile, it would be necessary to have a notification function that is triggered not only by replies but also by new comments when they pass a threshold.
- lonk11 4y ago
  LinkLonk supports comment notifications for any item that you have subscribed to. You get notified through browser notifications and email. And you can mute/follow individual branches of the comment tree. Details: https://linklonk.com/item/396040801387544576 https://linklonk.com/item/396040801387544576 There is definitely more to improve, but I'd like to see more use of the comments section first to know what needs to be improved next. As for ActivityPub, I just saw https://go-fed.org/ https://go-fed.org/ on HN and it looks like a good fit to add ActivityPub support to LinkLonk (since it is written in Go). There are multiple ways to do it, so let me know how you would like to see it working. Do you want to follow posts of Mastodon users on LinkLonk (similar to how it shows you RSS content)? Do you want Mastodon users to be able to follow your channels on LinkLonk (e.g. @s3000@linklonk.com)?
  - s3000 4y ago
    >LinkLonk supports comment notifications ... can mute/follow individual branches Great! >how you would like to see it working That's a difficult question. My primary focus is on the availability of discussions. Nevertheless, integrating LinkLonk in both directions with Mastodon should help with growth. There doesn't seem to be an algorithmic timeline, which LinkLonk could provide. Establishing LinkLonk as an integrated RSS Reader and ActivityPub Client could attract a bigger user base that makes calculating suggestions easier. What ActivityPub can bring to new social networks like LinkLonk is the ability to share the comment section with various other providers. E.g. RSS readers or annotating browser plugins can pool their comments in one place to have an active discussion even if each tool has a small user number. However, pooling discussions is generally avoided: 1. When there is a dupe on HN, the discussion in the old submission is not continued. 2. There exist various aggregators like lobste.rs, reddit.com/programming or tildes.net, that almost discuss the same articles as HN, but they are different communities. 3. Twitter and Mastodon could pool the replies to posts of the same url, but they don't. The trivial approach for LinkLonk would be an integration with lemmy.ml and all Mastodon posts that discuss the same URL. That way, most posts would come with a discussion and LinkLonk instantly had a vibrant community. With the pool-avoiding behavior in mind, some adjustments could be needed but I haven't figured out what that could be.

mawise 4y ago

> I am wondering what will happen if RSS readers find a way to share comments on posts The IndieWeb community is focused on this with Social Readers[1] and Webmentions[2]. The core idea is your reader also ties into your own published feed, so you can make a comment right in your reader that publishes the comment to your own feed and sends a webmention to the original article so they know about it. Barriers to entry are still kinda high (much like making a website 25 years ago) so any adoption should lead to a better signal/noise ratio. Unless it becomes popular enough for bots to start spamming the webmentions... [1]: https://indieweb.org/social_reader https://indieweb.org/social_reader [2]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention https://indieweb.org/Webmention

account42 4y ago
Webmention depends on the original source to link back to those comments for discovery though, right? I think perhaps a better approach would be a way to comment on any URL and see comments from other users (or communities) that you have subscribed to. That way the author of the content being discussed is not in a position to limit the discussion to what they approve of and you can discuss things that are not even opted into this system. Ideally this system would also be integrated into browsers you you can see and write comments even when visiting a URL directly.
- mawise 4y ago
  Thats exactly what my vision is for comments on Haven[1]. Without webmentions, you're just telling your friends/followers what you think which enables private comments/conversations on public content. [1]:https://havenweb.org https://havenweb.org

msephton 4y ago

I at the end of each of my blog posts I include a link to the tweet where I announced the post. Works well for me. If Twitter dies I guess I'll have to swap them out at some point. Alternatively, you could use something like a Discus embed for comments but I didn't want to have one more thing to manage.