My Initial Thoughts on Commenting Here

In this here blog, I have been thinking about how I want commenting to go. I am hoping to post a little about it now. I suspect it will change as time moves on, but this is what I am thinking (looks at calendar) now on date of this post.

Bot Prevention

Let’s be real here, AI is out of the bottle. Though I don’t think it will solve anything huge and I also think what it is now has ecological consequences that are terrible. I don’t think we are at a point yet where a bot will initiate a well thought out conversation with someone from a tiny blog that doesn’t allow commenting the way most blogs to. So job done here (for now)!!

No “Hot Takes”

I want this blog to encourage and be a space for me to give more thoughtful responses. I want to take the time and respond to a blog or social post and make sure I am coming at it reasonably informed or at least convivial. I intend to post the link to the blog or social I am replying about and then comment in the post (maaaaybe the social?) with a link to my post. I know it isn’t webmention, but I’m doing mine in the old fashioned, slow living way.

I also want people to respond to me in a convivial way. I want us all to treat people like people (and we all are people). If they want to engage with me over the ways to contact me, then we can have a conversation and I would intend and be happy to make a follow up post summarizing our discussion.

Informed Consent

I was talking about the blog in Mastodon and someone mentioned this topic and to quote them without attribution for now (you know who you are):

I thought about the informed consent aspect, and somebody replying to a toot isn’t automatically giving me permission to share their reply on my blog.

I think I’m still considering this overall and how to work on it formally. I think responding to a blog post and at least commenting on the post with a link to my reply is a good start and goes along with the indieweb POSSE mindset.

Final Thoughts

All I know is that I want to slow down, consider my thoughts, and consider others in a way that I think we should have done from the birth of the web but maybe lost sight of somewhere along the way (if it ever really was there).

Any suggestions or thoughts? Feel free to lemme know!