I want to enable comments on my blog again, but (I'm current possibly overthinking things in that) I'm worrying if I need a privacy policy, or how I should think about things like GDPR, and should users be able to delete their comments?

Simon Willison

Never thought about this stuff for a second back in the 2000s!

Simon Willison

It's difficult to find good answers to these questions, I'm not sure what to search for and I don't trust LLMs for this kind of thing either

Seth Michael Larson

@simon if I were adding comments to my site I would probably use webmentions. Encourages people to comment on social and you still get to decide which comments get surfaced.

Jan Lehnardt :couchdb:

@simon honestly: would not sign up to host other people’s content/identity on my blog.

Simon Willison

@sethmlarson I'm actually thinking I'll do GitHub auth and require accounts to have existed for more than six months there (unless I allow-list someone), I turned off comments last time because of spam

Matt Campbell

@simon What about spam? How are you going to balance between preventing spam and not discriminating against disabled users with captchas?

Simon Willison

@janl yeah, I get that there's a risk here - but I'm losing faith in the thing where conversations happen elsewhere, I want to post things like "what X do you recommend?" and host the results in one place

If it's no longer possible for an individual to run a comments section that would /suck/

Simon Willison

@matt I was planning on doing sign-in-with-github and require accounts there to be at least six months old so when I ban someone it at least costs them something (plus I can allow-list individuals with newer accounts on a case-by-case basis)

Spoofer3

@simon, I don't know answer to your question, though I'm curious what outcomes you desire with user comments on your blog. For some kinds of feedback, email seems a way for small corrections and clarifications. If more two way/multiway discussion, then that seems forum like rather than blog.

Joseph Szymborski :qcca:

@simon I'm not a lawyer (or in the EU), but would ActivityPub comments maybe solve your problem? You wouldn't be "processing user data" as it were, so that might side step things and shift liability to you Mastodon instance.

On Mastodon-powered Blog Comments

This blog has a comment section and it's powered by ActivityPub pixies. I share some thoughts about the pros and cons.

(jszym.com)

Simon Willison

@jszym I host my own personal Mastodon instance already so say that won't save me any worry!

Simon Willison

@Spoofer3 I mainly want to be able to crowdsource answers to interesting questions in a place where I can set the rules and ensure the content stays available long term