@manton Listening to today’s Core Intuition — a couple of thoughts:

Dumping Slack: If you want to dump Slack, I say go for it! I do like the idea of having a forum separate from micro.blog where folks can discuss micro.blog tips, tricks and use cases. I don’t think Slack is a good forum for that, because it’s ephemeral. Discourse would be great for it, and has proven itself in several cases. However, I respect your desire to reduce the number of support channels.

Dumping Facebook: I’ve been thinking about what’s keeping me from dumping Facebook, and the answer is the conversation. 90% of the conversation I have about my posts happens on Facebook. I think of micro.blog as an archival medium. I’m grateful for the occasional comment here, but it’s not what I’m here for.

And if I moved off Facebook to micro.blog, I’d lose on that conversation. I can’t see asking my Facebook friends to join micro.blog as it currently exists.

However, what if there was an easy way for my anyone to leave a comment at the bottom of a post on mitchwagner.blog, or in my RSS feed, or on my daily newsletter (I use Mailchimp to distribute a daily compilation of my RSS feed to subscribers). There’d be a link marked “Comment” at the bottom of every post on mitchwagner.blog, which would allow a registered micro.blog user to leave a reply, and unregistered users to create an account in less than a minute, and then leave a reply. Replies would appear in the micro.blog stream and also at the bottom of each post (as they are now with micro.blog @replies).

This would allow for comments from people who are not participants in the micro.blog community. It would provide a first step to joining that community for people who are not yet members, and who might decide, hey, this micro.blog thing has been nice; I think I’ll start my own.

The feature could incorporate a code snippet to use micro.blog as a comments platform for WordPress, blot. etc.

And it would create a way for anyone who subscribes to micro.blog by RSS to leave comments on a post. I’d find that helpful myself — I’d prefer to subscribe to my stream in an RSS reader but I am currently stymied because it’s too hard to reply to a post. So instead I read micro.blog in an app or on the web.

What do you think?

@MitchWagner @manton what a great post. I think your ideas about providing a commenting platform are great. I have ditched Facebook and don’t miss it, but I have set up a rule in Inoreader to forward each of my micro.blog posts via email to my wife and mother. That’s the only way either of them will see them. My mom will occasionally reply back to me via the email but if there was a way for her to follow and comment directly via the site I reckon she would do it.

@canion Thank you!

Did you have many people in a community, and much activity on FB before you left?

I don't see myself pulling the plug on FB anytime soon, even if @Manton does implement my suggestions or something as good for open commenting. But I'd love to get more activity here, and if this place grows and FB becomes more problematic, then who knows?

@MitchWagner Nah, my Facebook activity was pretty light. I never got involved in groups or whatnot. And the comments were all fairly benign. And my feed was mainly reposts rshter than original content. I don’t miss Facebook at all.

@MitchWagner agree with all - the ability to allow easy comments on your own site surely HAS to be the next BIG thinkg ... @manton? PLEASE? It would be a ‘simple’ extension to add to the ‘replies' threads we have - so people outside the MB world can just comment in.

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Re slack - dump away … I just looked - 22 slack groups in my app - mostly desserts … the ones that are active are confused - and you either live there ... I won’t ... or you pop in every now and then and mark ... 'all read’

it is NOT a system that should be deployed ‘for all’

Re FB - i ‘left’ it about 5 years ago - although I reinstated 1 year ago - purely to TRY TO amplify what I do outside of the app (hasn’t worked - but I don’t spend too much time try8in have to say) ... I wanted to because I had about 1,500 ‘followers' over there - and was interestd to see who I could bring to the new spaces ... not much luck.

even when I was there … I mainly lived in the groups … interesting to note - after I left for 4 years and then came back - most of the groups that were once such a vibrant places were all dormant …

we had RockON!, BooksON!, ArtON!, BeveragesON! ... etc - you get the picture …

also like everywhere ... it’s about 5% of ANY group that populates 95% of the posts - no different in the ON! spaces - so I guess when I left that killed a lot of the posts for people to comment on.

ONWARDS sir - GREAT IDEA.

@JohnPhilpin Well, I’m not going to suggest that the comments system I describe has to be “the next big thing” for micro.blog.@manton sets the agenda and I’m OK with that — but I’m happy to make suggestions.

@MitchWagner Replying directly from a blog post is planned for Conversation.js. Right now it just displays the conversation, but later it could include something similar to a comment form.

@MitchWagner truthy ... but for me ... when it comes ... it would be the next big thing - and judging by Manton's reply - Converation.js (2.0ish) is my friend!

@manton Good news! I'm looking forward to seeing how this is implemented.

@DrKnittyGritty Good question. My guess is that because Micro.blog is storing the replies, you wouldn't need to worry about GDPR because we would handle it. But your readers would need to know to contact Micro.blog.

@DrKnittyGritty @manton I'm going to step back a bit and restate my request in terms of goals rather than specifics:

I want to make it easy for people who are not currently on micro.blog to leave comments on my blog. They should be able to do it from an individual blog post at the main URL – mitchwagner.blog – rather than by having to engage in the stream. This should work no matter how a reader consumes an individual post – web, RSS, email, whatever.

As a side-benefit, even people engaged in the community could consume their feed in an RSS reader, rather than the micro.blog clients.

There. That's pretty much it.

@MitchWagner @DrKnittyGritty What I have in mind should help with that. Another option that works today is using Disqus (see this help page).

@manton I think I'll wait until your option is available. Happy to discuss if you wish. Thanks!

@manton Thank you! Sounds good! In time we may want to think about a ’Privacy policy’ page integrated on the blogs that lists the details how micro.blog deals with the data. I am probably thinking to far ahead.