No Comments!

This site is an attempt to un-platform while giving me (and anybody that wants some help) a means to create a simple and secure platform to share some thoughts and experiences.

I don’t intend to do any promotion of this site. It’s my public diary and scrapbook.

So, I’m doing my best to stay away from any technology that tracks interactions - like you, reading this line now.

The technology (github pages and jekyll) offers a framework that supports my goals. There are many themes that support Comments on the blog framework. It sounded like a nice to have, but not essential feature to me.

As I’ve learned more about the platform, I’ve realised a deeper set of complexity that comes with what might be considered simple blog comments.

The world is illusory. Brahman alone is real. Brahman is the World.

Disqus.

Yeah, I’d love to discuss this. But I quickly came to realise that Disqus is not a suitable technology/platform for what I’m trying to achieve here. (It’s commonly integrated into Jekyll themes and would be ‘easy’ to deploy)

I was always a bit suspect of Disqus links in sites and pages. What, you want me to sign up just to say “Hell Yeah”?. That was a decent instinct.

I’ll cut to the chase. Pretty much any means that I’ve looked at that allows me to:

• run a static website
• allows anyone/everyone/someone to comment (write)

… will kind of break the mould. Sounds hard to believe. I’m pretty amazed that I never really thought about this before - just show’s how long it’s been since I’ve been actively involved in publishing anything custom online.

For now, I’m going to manually curate any comments via email until I figure this one out.

Not convinced. Yet.

The following appears to be containing a fair bit if truth.

• If you sign up with someone/anyone’s online ‘service’, they will be capturing parts of your digital identity, even if they have nothing but good intentions!
• I could deploy my own comments system on a webserver somewhere. I could let anyone reply. As soon as I do that, I’ll have to manage spam and bots. This breaks the simplicity mould, meaning anything I achieve here might be of little use to others (especially people that don’t want to get into the tech details)
• Curating the content might be a perfectly reasonable answer for a low volume of responses. Maybe one day I’ll upset somebody by ignoring/blocking their comments. That is a tiny issue for now… and
• There’s gotta be a way to do this.

And what is ‘this’?

Use a digital identity system that give’s visitors/commenters the ability to protect their Digital Identity and any data/content they create.

In an ideal world, it might look like this:

• You read some content and want to reply ‘inline’.
• The experience has gotta be easy - say, no harder than replying to a tweet. (people’s preference for Ease is never more obvious than when they are Online (IMO))
• We can leave a moderated ‘gate’ open for anonymous commenters.
• Commentors might be prepared to use one of their digital Identities to sign and own their comments
• There should be trust assigned by Web of Trust Model that is easy to use. Ahem, you say. I know - this could be tricky to implement.
• I have a personal ‘belief’ that people would like an anonymised digital Identity that can be part of a Web of Trust. I might be dreaming. I might be off with The Fairies. For now, I’m gonna dig into this idea.