There has been a lot of talk about website comments on Bubbles. I think it started with a post by Forking Mad, and a bunch of replies are linked at the bottom of that page. My blog posts have had a "Reply by e-mail" button for years. Some of them also link to other places where you can comment. This has been a nice trade-off: giving people the chance to comment somewhere where others will find it, but not having to manage the comments myself. I do enjoy reading comments below blog posts, though. It's always enlightening to read something and then have other people's opinions right below. Starting today1, it's possible to leave comments below my blog posts. There's a small delay, as I have to manually approve every comment. I don't want to be advertising some shady cryptocurrency tomorrow. (My guestbook has also been migrated from Meadow Guestbooks to the same backend that now serves blog comments.) Webmentions? When I wrote the new comment code, I also added support for webmentions in addition to the form at the bottom. It was live for about an hour before I removed it. As it happens, Kev Quirk wrote an article about privacy and webmentions while I was testing. Webmentions (and ActivityPub) cause your message to be copied to other sites, where it could remain even after you've modified or deleted the original. That's how the system works. In my opinion, if you publish something on a public page, it should be considered public and can be expected to stay out there for a long time.2 But it certainly is a point of discussion. Similar issues exist with services like Bridgy that sync messages between social media silos. That's why I decided to only accept comments that were submitted through a form on the article page. Your comment is published on the exact same page where you wrote it.3 There can't be much discussion about that, right? Upvotes! While researching how other people and platforms implement comments, I came across Bear Blog. They have this rather simple upvote button. I couldn't find much documentation about it; it seems to be called "toast" or "like" here and there. You don't need an account and you don't even need to leave your contact details. You just push it, and the number goes up. So while I was adding the required interactivity for comments, I also introduced a similar thumbs up button. If you like a post, you can click it. The number goes up. If you like it more, you can click it again, and the number goes up again! It's not used for anything other than displaying a silly number at the bottom. It does looks nice, though. I was told blog posts with comments sections need some kind of actionable callout, so: please leave a comment! Sorry, I lied. The comments section has been live for a few weeks now. It doesn't really matter: nobody reads these posts so nobody noticed. But now it's official! ↩ Comments that have been published on my own website will be removed if the author asks, as explained in my privacy policy. ↩ And it may be copied to hundreds of other places by random internet scrapers, like the Internet Archive. Somehow this is always ignored in discussions about webmentions and activitypub. ↩ Thanks for subscribing to my feed!Feel free to e-mail comments or corrections to vic@demuzere.be.