Pure Comments and the Fediverse
| 2 min read
I recently wrote about Privacy and Webmentions to make the case — mostly to myself — for adding Fediverse integration to Pure Comments.
A few people pushed back in the comments, but my position could generally be summarised with "if it's a public post, it's fair game."
Then this morning I read this post by Manu and it's completely changed my opinion.
Having now read the Webmention spec it never presents Webmentions as being "comments". At all times they're referred to as "notifications". More specifically:
A Webmention is a notification that one URL links to another. For example, Alice writes an interesting post on her blog. Bob then writes a response to her post on his own site, linking back to Alice's original post. Bob's publishing software sends a Webmention to Alice notifying that her article was replied to, and Alice's software can show that reply as a comment on the original post.
The Webmention spec
That's not what I implemented in Pure Comments.
So what's the plan?
My plan is to completely remove all Fediverse functionality from Pure Comments in the next release. The existing Webmention endpoint will remain so that Pure Comments can still send/receive Webmention notifications to/from other blogs.
Pure Comments will no longer integrate with the Fediverse at all.
This will also be a massive simplification of the Pure Comments code, so I'm looking forward to that as the Fediverse integration is very difficult to manage, and honestly I've already implemented a couple of "hacks" to fix small issues. So I won't be too sad to see it go from a development perspective.
Some people are going to be pissed off at this - many like the Fedi integration, and I like it too. But having read Manu's perspective, I agree with him.
If you're using the Pure Comments Fedi integration and want to keep using it after the next release, my advice would be to either fork Pure Comments, or stay on the current version.
Subscribe for more!
You don't have to keep coming back here to read my latest waffle. There's a couple of ways to subscribe to receive updates whenever I publish new content.