You may have noticed that I do not offer a comment form below my posts.

This is partly due to me not wanting you to bother with making an account on my site, because the last thing anyone wants is yet another account somewhere (or sign in via Facebook/Google) and me not wanting to bother with spam and the burden to moderate every entry.

There are still ways to interact with me or my posts.

Backfeeds

On some social media I make use of so called backfeeds. This is basically copying or displaying a reply or reaction at the source of an article or note.

The data affected by this was already made public by the data subject. The terminology for displaying such data differs depending on the platform.

Twitter for examples uses the term “hydrating a tweet”. Others simply show a number for a particular kind of interactions while linking back to the original source.

For some I don’t bother with this because it’s to difficult or even prohibited to do so. Feel free to interact anyway, since I am present on such networks as well and do not just cross-post every bit in a blinded manner.

Webmentions

The far superior way though is to react via a Webmention using your own website. That is a is a web standard for mentions and conversations across the web and a keystone for websites on the IndieWeb. Learn more about Webmention at:

https://indieweb.org/Webmention

So to respond to a post on your own website send the URL of your response to my Webmention endpoint. This is usually done automatically by some sort of plugin for the CMS of your choosing but can be done manually too.

Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post’s URL again.

ActivityPub

Another way is to simply comment or react to a post via ActivityPub on the Fediverse. See Follow Me for more details.