Commenting on comments
Saturday, August 9, 2025There has been some discussion lately in the Blaugust community about comments on blogs. Some of the more veteran Blaugust contributors are frustrated by the new wave of minimalist, static blogs that do not have the option to comment but only offer an email address to respond. Apparently, Blaugust used to be all about the comments; now the conversation tends to happen on other platforms that not everyone uses, which has soured the experience somewhat. As someone whose blog is firmly in the "minimalist static blog that provides only an email address" category, I thought I'd respond.
I'll begin by saying I get where these guys are coming from. I like comment sections, and find it annoying when some content on a platform that usually allows comments has them disabled. I can also understand how the drift of Blaugust away from commentable blogs will have changed the character of Blaugust.
Bhagpuss correctly identifies why I at least don't have comments enabled. For me, it is that they can attract spam, which I then have to deal with, and also the technical and financial overhead they would add to my site. However, as I have said, I do like comments.
Bhagpuss's thoughts about how it would feel rude and intrusive to email the author of a blog surprises me, in the sense I'd never considered people would feel this way. I imagine there is just a bit of a culture difference going on here. Among us minimalists, it is just a cultural norm that it is okay to use the email address provided to contact an author. I mean, we are literally inviting you to do exactly that.
Even better than an email is to write a response blog post, post it, and then inform the original blogger (using either email or WebMention (but this introduces more technical overhead)). However, this is still not a satisfactory replacement for comments, I'll admit. An email allows a reader to start a conversation with the author of a blog. A comment opens a conversation with the blog's author and other members of their audience. On the other hand, a response post on one's own blog opens a conversation with the blogger, their audience, and the reader's audience, which is not always desirable. So clearly, commenting fulfills a role that the standard interaction options pushed by the "indieweb" crowd doesn't address.
The other strategy, of encouraging the conversation to take place on the fediverse (or other social platform) also has its downsides. For one, it requires the commenter to have an account on the same platform as the blogger. Which... you know, I completely get, not everyone wants to be on the fediverse because not everyone likes microblogging (I don't really like it, even though I use Mastodon). It also has the downside of inviting "drive-by" commenters who are not part of the blogger's community and are not reading the original post in context.
All this said, I may have just talked myself into adding comments. I'm considering meh. Currently, I pay nothing for my website hosting (Cloudflare pages is free for static sites with modest needs). The cheapest DigitalOcean Droplet would be sufficient to cover my commenting needs, which will come out much cheaper than my previous hosting solution. So it is financially doable, I suppose. I could cut down the amount of spam by de-indexing from Google, relying primarily on social networks (which is not limited to social media) to find readers. I mean, has any human ever found my site via Google anyway?