On Dreamwidth, there is an option to create an “Access List.” This Access List is used for all sorts of privacy-based things, such as being a whitelist of who can view certain posts you make. One thing it’s also used for is commenting. You can set it so that only people on your Access List can comment at all, or that all comments by other people have to be manually approved by you before they’re shown while people on your Access List are approved automatically.
I’ve seen the latter used far more than the former, but both have been used by people writing about sensitive topics that attract harassers. Sometimes it’s easier to manually approve everything than lose sleep worrying that people had a field day while you were gone.
Really great feedback – I didn’t know about either of these services (or at least how they worked) before. The name assignment for anonymous users makes a lot of sense, both for having better conversations and doing moderation.
Going off this idea, I’d imagine sort of progressive identities, where you can generate a new one any time (but no more than 1 per post) and switch between them like you can on Write.as. This way you could stay anonymous between posts, or carry a name across certain posts if you want – whether that’s 2 different ones or for all the commenting you do.
The access list is another great idea. The options could be something like:
Open comments
Comments require permission (you’re able to request)
Comments only by invite (you can’t request access)
I do think moderation is going to be important for a lot of people, especially since many are already writing on a privacy-focused writing platform. I’d like to have support for varying levels of anonymity too, but I’m thinking the best route might be to give the site owner that ultimate control, and the service just provides a range of options.
I’m thinking like including ActivityPub/Federation support would be a nice feature, as suggested in this this tweet. I could imagine people commenting on a website and responding to other commenters in mastodon on the same comment box. That’d be cool.
Yep, I’m thinking the same thing. Having replies to federated Write.as blogs appear here would fit with our design philosophy, and enabling anyone to embed an AP-enabled commenting system would be really useful.
No actual progress on this yet, besides gathering ideas.
What would speed up development is if we see more demand for this, or if people were willing to pay for it, or contribute to a small crowdfunding campaign to get it launched.
I completely agree with what @alfie has to say here. Most of the websites I visit have commenting system but very few people use it and most of them flock to Facebook or Twitter or other social media sites to provide feedback. The better thing to do would be to have a link at the end of the blog post connecting to the shared post on any social media site so that people can go there and give feedback. Often times, comment systems are only used by trolls where they force writers into having a biased preference. I don’t think remark.as is needed at all.
Personally think it would be awesome if something could show comments from the fediverse embedded. So conversation happens in fediverse but can still be displayed.
I’d love to see actual ActivityPub enabled comments! I would also spend some money on a crowd funding. I’m not sure about a regular payment for a service though.
@matt Here’s an open source embedded comments system, similar to Disqus (but no ads, no tracking).
Maybe could be useful, for Write.as? (I’m developing it. Maybe we could cooperate somehow, if I slowly slowly implement features you need)
Among the features you’ve listed above: Guest / anonymous commenting, & spam prevention, implemented. Import & export is on the roadmap.
About the questions, “What would you like to see”: I have been thinking about integrating the blog comments with the fediverse, so that e.g. Mastodon replies or Webmentions, appear as comments, together with the other directly-posted comments, and can be upvoted and replied to. Sounds like what @geekgonecrazy has in mind?
Tools that promote real conversation. What is that? No idea, but I know that FB and Twitter et al promote disingenuious conversation by the way they trigger addictive behavior my stimulating the amigdula (I think?). So a good way to start/learn is to do something different than they do. Sardonic grin.
I don’t have much to offer on the technical side. My singular rule for any forum I moderate is people need to strive to uphold everyone’s human dignity with their comments, so a simple way to remind them occationally when they post would be helpful. Thanks! I’ve been puzzling how to have interactive capacity that people use, and comments get used more than email, but as someone said in the thread, people are addicted to flockig to FB and Twitter. Sigh. I really do not want to promote that.
Don’t take me wrong: Write.as is the best at what it does, and I know that it strives to be a minimalist, distraction free, focus-on-just-writing platform. Actually, it’s the best writing platform out there. And that’s what it is: a writing platform. Not a blogging platform.
I’m really looking forward for the development of Remark.as, but if it’s not a priority, then that’s a deal breaker for me.
Disturbingly unbelievable. So this is what happens when you upset some random nameless powerful people that just don’t want your open source project to ever come out of the paper. The worst part of it is that we don’t even know why they’re being banned everywhere.