Boosts/repeats/renotes are appreciated!
After lurking around the interwebs for examples, it seems that the <comments> tag can point to any web page. This makes sense because HTML rather relaxed anyway.
However, I stumbled upon the more interesting <wfw:commentRss>, which should point to a comment feed. Unfortunately the Well-Formed Web has been dead for around a decade and a specification is no where to be found. A summary on Chris Sells’ web log is still available thanks to the Wayback Machine though.
I’m rather saddened that works for a decentralized web for everyone to interact with each other had exist back in the early 2000s and their impact can still be seen today, yet most of us (youngsters) aren’t aware of them.
Wheel reinventions like ActivityPub are great, but I wonder if we can bring back web feed now that static site hosting is virtually no-cost. Feed readers are dying but even Google is trying to revive them.
The problem is with comments: a dynamic server to accept them would disqualify the staticness and low cost. Of course an ActivityPub implementation can support this (many generate RSS already), but static servers are way more efficient than a Fediverse one, and not everyone has an account of the later for a seamless adoption.
Emails, on the other hand, are universal and also federated. Converting a mailing list thread to RSS/Atom or HTML should be trivial, although comments won’t be expected to be rendered immediately due to the static nature. This comes with naturals advantages though: one can monitor comments before publishing and self-archiving the site with comments (e.g. via #IPFS) is trivial.
Unlike dynamic commenting systems, ones backed by emails can easily outlive the website. It doesn’t have to be a mailing list, one can extract comments from a private mailbox just fine; also those mboxed can be migrated from one list to another. All it takes for a reader to comment is to know the current address.
Is this the permanent web we’re all looking for, laying right in front of our eyes?
@cnx this is very interesting, I thought decentralized replies had to have a Web API on the origin message's Web server to "submit" comments. Are you saying that a link to comments hosted on the commenter's static site be submitted to the origin message's static site via e-mail?
@tetrislife, I understand it like this: traditionally one would POST the comment to the server, which then insert it to the database to be used the next time the page is rendered. IIUC with Web 3 one’s server would be replaced by a collection of other people’s servers (or mining machines), with the perk of worse efficiency.
My argument is that for a personal blog, there’s no need for a server polling 24/7 for comments; instead the blogger can regenerate the site only when there are new ones. The transport medium can be moved to email, which everyone needs a (shared) server for anyway. The mail boxes can then be exported from local mail box (if one uses mbsync or alike) for private comments and mailing lists for public one. They can then be filtered and formatted properly for the static site and the comment RSS feed.
You’re right, @tetrislife, email is also a storage, but a immutable one, which isn’t desirable if one wants to correct typos or update information in a blog. In addition, no current MUA has a layout similar to RSS/Atom readers (categorize entries by source/author). I’m not exactly a fan of HTML email either.
I’m experimenting with a method that should take as little engineering effort as possible for readers to immediately adopt with current technologies. So far it seems to be working: