Drop Me a Line

For years, the comment system on this site was essentially webmentions. It worked, mostly because I was able to syndicate my posts to social networks like Google+ (does anybody remember that?), Facebook, or Twitter, and then pull the comments back from there. With time, the social networks became more locked-down and I hardly go there anymore (not only for that reason).

Webmentions are quite a niche thing; not everyone wants to own a website¹, and even people who do may not have webmention support on their sites². They are still useful to interact with webmention-enabled-site owners, as well as Fediverse inhabitants, but a lot of people around me don’t fall into those categories. I could expand to Telegram, I think. That would require syndicating my posts to a channel there, and pulling back the comments. Looks doable, but to be honest, I don’t feel like putting my effort in another closed platform that is likely to fence up and slowly die, like the others. Meanwhile, there’s another system that should work reasonably well.

The idea has been on my mind for quite some time. A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon an old post by Fluffy, and decided this would be the next thing I do for my site. Today, I’m finally doing it: starting from now, every post has a link you can click and send a comment via email. Yes, this one has the link, too; it’s right above the page footer.

Email is, perhaps, the simplest form of online communication. Everybody has email, everybody uses it. You don’t need any fancy technology or another account on yet another site to comment, that’s the way the Net was meant to be. It was always OK to drop me an email about anything posted on my site, but now it’s even more straightforward, and officially endorsed. Drop me a line!