Comments
labs.tomasino.org
I’ve been kicking around an idea that comments–public feedback systems in general–are not helpful to the development of social systems. The scope of my thinking is fairly limited to online media like blogs, social networks, and media sharing, but it may hold some truth beyond the digital boundaries as well. When you read something noteworthy online, what drives you to interact with it? I have identified a few triggers that are related to the original content and not to another comment:

You know, sometimes Indieweb people say “this is a case for webmentions!” when I’m… not really sure it’s a case for webmentions. But this?

This is 100% a case for webmentions.

When I post something on my website, brid.gy syncs it over to Mastodon as well. Then when someone responds, that gets formatted as a webmention, as here. But if someone wants, they can use a webmention to put their reply to something right on their own site (hi matt hope it’s okay to use this as an example). The webmention acts as a programmatic notification about it, so I can decide whether or not to link/excerpt on my page and my webmention software handles the paperwork. It’s like

[authoring] your own post and [emailing] her to notify her of your thoughts, giving her the ability to add a link to the follow-up discussion.

but made easy.