Lorraine Lee<p><span class="h-card"><a href="https://werd.social/users/ben" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>ben</span></a></span> I've noticed a very strong tendency for what's left of the blogosphere to go no-comment. I've assumed most of this is some combination of (1) the extreme tediousness of spam filtering in the current bot-infested state of the web, and (2) the tendency to equate "reply" with "guy." I've been vaguely aware that questions of liability might enter into it. I see this as a loss, as my fond memories of the golden age of blogging are memories of the blogosphere as a conversation, not an essay collection. In the latter case, might as well jump on the (imho execrable) "newsletter" bandwagon.</p><p>I like IndieWeb's approach to implementing comments as "web mentions" except for one thing. It tends to turn blogging into a conversation among server-side netizens, which strikes me as somewhat elitist.</p><p>As for ActivityPub, I see almost a landlord-tenant relationship between instance operators and ordinary users. People try to explain it in terms of adminning being either philanthropy or professionalism, but I'm not buying it. If it's professionalism, then inevitably the Fediverse gets monetized, and everything that (IMO) INHERENTLY comes with that--paywalls, adwalls, DRM, etc. If it's philanthropy, it's givers and takers, and the former drop out one by one until they're all gone.</p><p>I'd rather see a culture of self-hosting arise, but I don't see it realistically happening. Spinning up an instance should be as simple as running a program on one's local machine (desktop or mobile). Communication with other instance should happen without something so paywalled as domain names. To be decentralized there should be some kind of bat signal that propagates through the network indicating a peer looking to connect with its peers. Nothing so centralized as a clearinghouse for such connections. But I can think of no way to do this within the current architecture of the Internet.</p><p><a href="https://cambrian.social/search?tag=WebMention" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WebMention</span></a> <a href="https://cambrian.social/search?tag=Fediverse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Fediverse</span></a> <a href="https://cambrian.social/search?tag=SelfHosting" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>SelfHosting</span></a></p>