I read Ben Werdmüller’s post on his Medium experiment and started writing in his comment form, and ended up here¹.

Mean time to comment is an interesting metric to think about for the different channels in which readers read your blog.

I didn’t email you because I am in my RSS reader or in my browser and the effort level of ALL the stuff I have to talk to you about crowds out the brief comment ;)

This is totally not an average user thing, but Medium like “comments that are blog posts” is maybe interesting.

The way I’ve thought about this is, use Micropub! You have a comment form, and people write in there, but you give the option to authenticate to their Micropub blog. I would write a post, but it would end up as a reply on my own blog.

Also: logging in via Twitter and posting to Twitter would work too (or Mastodon). And probably be much more widely used.

Or: check a box and say “email these comments to Ben and don’t publish them” or however to word that.

I currently use Micro.blog. I only get comments via Twitter. I need to wedge Webmentions in there but self hosted that plus Bridgy plus various ways I need to set that up… unlikely to happen. Plus I’ve been thinking about what to use for subscribe to my blog by email, since RSS doesn’t work for everyone.

Reply by email to comment —which Discourse forums do — is another thing.

Also: because you have a form — I wrote a TON and just hit submit! Which will likely lead to an email back and forth!

Can I pay for social comments?

Last idea, because you want to build community, is that Discourse forums can be set up so that every blog post gets a forum thread.

It is relatively easy to setup for someone technical like you or me, costs about $10/month on Digital Ocean.