Trying Commentbox

tl;dr I’m trying Commentbox for comments.

My general opposition to comment sections on blogs almost entirely boils down to convenience.

It’s very inconvenient to post comments on blogs. Full stop. Specifically logging in to post comments.

It’s also very inconvenient to host comments on a homegrown, static blog site, like mine.

Now I could list off a slew of security, legal, and ideological reasons to oppose blog comment sections, but still, it’s a handy way to communicate with blog authors, and, in this modern post-Twitter, post-Musk, post-social world we live in, where we’ve all scurried back behind locked gates to hide from the world, and this web site is just about the only window into my existence on the Internet anymore, it doesn’t seem like a terrible idea to add a way to actually contact me.

Enabling blog comments wouldn’t have been my first choice for a web-based messaging system, but today I stumbled onto a comment solution called Commentbox and I added it to the site template. It was incredibly easy, and it was free. It took roughly five minutes from beginning to end.

Compare and contrast with how it took me weeks to set up Remark42 on a Linux box that one time.

Most importantly, I don’t have to host or manage it. So if they somehow steal and monetize your identity or your witty comments, or seed some AI language models, you can yell at them, not me. (Seriously, that’s something I could see comment platforms doing. Read the terms and privacy policy.)

We’ll see how it goes.

P.S. The new DALL-E 3 image generator that’s integrated into ChatGPT makes pretty cool images.