Hey @jgoerzen, happy to answer these questions.
First, I think it’s key to understand that overall, the fediverse integration is primarily a method of distribution. WriteFreely is built more as a focused publishing platform than a social platform, so we deliberately left some features out to start. Then, we defer to the rest of the web to handle the social aspects, from comments to connecting with friends and followers.
Now to answer your points:
We’ve decided to take a different tack with comments, and will be building them into a separate add-on / feature called Remark.as (see discussion here – I’d love to have your input!). This won’t feature on-the-page “comments” in the classical blog sense, but will instead allow interconnected commenting via blog posts and ActivityPub / Webmentions.
Right now, all interaction is meant to happen on more “social” platforms like Mastodon. So to start conversations, you might mention your Mastodon account from your WriteFreely blog post, as I’ve done at the end of this post, and then get notified and carry on the conversation there.
I know this isn’t a very smooth process or very conventional, but we’re trying to be very deliberate about adding social features, so the product stays focused on its core purpose as a writing and publishing platform.
This is something we hope to address with Remark.as – it’ll notify you of any replies or mentions.
Let me know if I can help clarify anything else. While we’re doing this in a bit of an opinionated way, we’re continually open to feedback and changing our assumptions based on how people plan to actually use WriteFreely. So please feel free to share if you have any thoughts or criticism!