Replying to: Are Comments Worth It?
A conversation in the Blaugust Discord reminded me of an egregious omission I made in my post about blog comments (and the one about email!).
I forgot about webmentions ! I’ve even done a bunch of work implementing them for this site. That just goes to show how much of an impact the context of a conversation you’re having has on what you think to say. Nobody else brought up webmentions in the posts I read.
Webmentions, if you are not familiar, are a (relatively) simple protocol for websites to let each other know when they’ve posted a link to each other. There’s varying degrees of richness with which you can support them, but even at the most basic level it allows for me to write a blog post as a response to someone else’s post, and to have that automatically appear as something like a comment on their post. Or vice versa.
Now, one of the big problem with webmentions is that they are not well known. There’s plugins and bits and bobs of software to support them, but overall few sites have any idea what to do with a webmention. And that limits their usefulness. So this site is listening for webmentions, but few of the sites linking to it are sending anything. And this site sends webmentions to the sites it links to, but few of them are listening. Alas.
Comment sections are an important part of blogging culture. But the most basic thing, even simpler than that, is to write your thoughts on a blog post as your own blog post. Webmentions are meant to layer on top of that to get the best of both worlds between blog responses and comments. Things can get awkward where static sites are concerned, but there are services like webmention.io that allow you to sort of bolt them on.
And so Naithin’s shot ricochets again.