Some Thoughts on Commenting

Today I dipped my toes back into IndieWeb land (lake?) by joining the pop-up session, “Respectful Responses.” I didn’t go in with a specific goal; it just sounded like a good topic:

How do we enable more positive serendipity & discovery via our websites, between both existing friends & family, and new positive interactions. And how do we raise barriers to spam, harassment, and other unpleasant social media interactions.

The session got me thinking more about the commenting experience for people without personal websites. David talked about the experience of leaving a comment and expecting it to appear immediately. Some sites will display a message that the comment is pending moderation, and some will even show the commenter a preview of their comment. My site does the former if I have not approved a comment from your email address before. I had not considered that could be a negative experience for some people. The more I thought about it, I realized that many times when I link an article on Facebook or Twitter, people will come to my site to read it then go back to the social site to leave a comment instead of using my local comment form.

This could be for various reasons. The most obvious is probably the ease of posting on the social site. It’s one text field, the comment appears immediately, and that is how people interact online the majority of the time. My local comment form with fields for name, email address, website, and comment is tedious by comparison. I realize the required email address field is off-putting as well.

I like the idea of changing that experience around so instead of a comment form that’s always public, comments are allowed from a trusted audience. That audience could be as broad as “people who have logged in to my site.” I think the barrier of logging in would still mean people would go back to the social sites to respond, though. I am not sure how to get around that. That is often the challenge with IndieWeb: creating experiences that are at least as easy as the silos.

I’ve released version 0.0.3 of mf2 to iCalendar, a library to convert h-event microformats into iCalendar.

It no longer throws an Exception if no h-event microformats are found. Instead it will generate a minimal, “empty” iCalendar. I had run into an instance where an upcoming events page was empty and the URL for the iCalendar was returning the Exception message.

I also changed the default domain to example.com, did some minor code cleanup, and renamed the git master branch to main.

Previously

Want to read: The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America's Most Progressive Era by Douglas R Egerton (ISBN 9781608195664)

I’m attending Homebrew Website Club - The Americas.

It’s been a minute!

Want to read: Going Indie by Brian Schrader (ISBN 9781636259598)

Want to read: Born Again and Again by Megan Westra (ISBN 9781513806754)

I did a double-take while scrolling, thinking, “what new feature is this, Twitter?”

Then I remembered that out of frustration I started adding fascists to a Twitter list titled “Fascists.” Now apparently Twitter is promoting it to me. XD

My mental health has not been great lately. I’ve been feeling pretty stressed out and all over the emotional spectrum. On Saturday I decided go to the beach at sunset. I always find that soothing. I really liked the symmetry of the pink sky being reflected on the wet sand.

⁂

I finished watching The Good Place recently and loved it. They talk about one Buddhist conception of death being an ocean wave that crashes on the shore. The wave is gone, but the water is still there. I thought about that as I watched the waves and took some moments to breathe and be present.

Bookmarked: Official Single-Sign-On for Discourse (sso)

Want to read: James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes by James Acaster (ISBN 9781472247186)

Loved his Netflix show Repertoire so really looking forward to this one.

Want to read: Broken (in the best possible way) by Jenny Lawson (ISBN 9781250077035)

Finished reading: A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by Hank Green (ISBN 9781524743482)

Want to watch: Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher

Bookmarked: CSS Bed

This is a collection of classless css themes to use as starting points in web development.

Bookmarked: “We the Unhoused”

“We The Unhoused is a podcast that lifts the voices and struggles of the unhoused in LA and beyond. Host Theo Henderson is currently unhoused and resides in Chinatown, Los Angeles. He tackles issues such as police brutality, harassment, policy, and the survival challenges of unhoused people. Through a series of interviews, we will discuss issues that are germane to unhoused people like the cost of living, gentrification, health struggles, harm reduction, and trauma-informed care. The revolution will be heard on this podcast. Tune in each week to be a part of it.”