For whatever reason, the Blaugust discord has a few recurring debates, one of which is whether or not a blog should have comments, and honestly, it’s been rubbing me the wrong way.

Let me not bury the lede here: I don’t think blogs need to have comments, and I say this as someone whose blog has both comments and webmentions installed. (It would have ActivityPub federation too, but it got to a point where I couldn’t be bothered.) And the idea that blogs should or even must is vaguely irritating to me. Some of these arguments boil down to:

• “If you don’t have comments enabled, then you’re just preaching your truth. You don’t want to have a conversation.”
• “Comments are community in the blogging space, so you’re not contributing to a community.”
• “This is how blogging culture has always been.”

So, in today’s post, I want to discuss this.

“If you don’t have comments enabled, then you’re just preaching your truth. You don’t want to have a conversation.”

Correct.

Okay, no, not really–but why is that so bad? If you believe this, why do you think it’s a bad thing for someone to opt out of other people’s viewpoints on it? It’s their blog. A blog or personal website is intrinsically a different thing than a social media account. It is entirely customizable and on your terms. Why is it a bad thing to have full ownership of your space in an era of the internet where we own so little?

I love Mastodon and the Fediverse, but even on Fedi I can’t opt out of comments. I can’t just keep people from commenting on my stuff. There are many reasons to post online, and only some of them are social. I would like to raise to you as a counterpoint the beauty of simply existing in public. Having an opinion, safely, in public. Being an openly queer person, or being open about your weird hobby, or being open about your experiences, in public, and not being attacked or refuted for it. Being a person in public is one of those things that we need as humans. Simply existing, in the context of other people.

Personally, I love to have these broader conversations. But it isn’t the only reason personal sites exist.

“Comments are community in the blogging space, so you’re not contributing to a community.”

If you want to have a conversation with me, I could still disable comments because there are a million ways to do it. I have a publically listed email at which I do and have received messages about things I’ve written. I have webmentions turned on, and several blogs where we mention each other frequently. I openly link my blog to my presence on the Fediverse (one-way, typically, from fedi to here) and have discussions there. I am a member of webrings! We, and all of these options, exist in a mutual ecosystem that allows you to choose the way you interact.

The cliche “the medium is the message” remains true here: With webmentions, the ecosystem of how we interact encourages people to react and build on ideas in their own blogs, sites, and spaces. There is nothing more encouraging to me as a writer than to have inspired an article on someone’s blog or made it into a “what I’m reading” round-up post. There is a certain amount of necessary care taken. We’re building something together that exists in both of our spaces.

Comments are great, but they’re just one example of this. They’re a form that necessarily exists in the context of the blog post, which is great (social media often has brutal context collapse), but the pro is also the con: The conversation starts and ends on that page. It’s one option to communicate with your blogging community, and not necessarily always the best one.

“This is how blogging culture has always been.”

Even if this is true (and I don’t necessarily agree), I think there’s a powerful new indieweb movement going on that is informing a lot of contemporary blogs and personal sites, and tradition shouldn’t weigh down what could be.

If you look at people who blog “into the aether”–no comments, no webmentions, no nothing–many of them are part of this indie movement, using Neocities or Nekoweb or other tools with low barriers to entry to learn HTML and CSS and other technology and reclaim their independence from social media and corporate-defined public presence. It’s a reaction to the way that sites like Facebook, Twitter, et. al. want to own your public persona, define what you get to talk about, censor anything that’s unprofitable, own your communication methods, and undermine your agency. The personal site stands independently of this corporate overreach.

And when you’re used to corporate overreach, and your public persona being a resource that can be mined for profit, and strangers yelling at you in your replies and DMs, and the dread you feel when a post gets too much attention and exits the sphere of friends and friends-of-friends, well, limiting comments from randos seems really appealing. The site doesn’t exist for them; it exists for you.

Relatedly, I’ve seen people weirdly derisive about static sites, like those generated with 11ty. Firstly, this is a weird take (personally I don’t get people who are still using wordpress.com, but you don’t see me on my high horse about it), but secondly, these personal static sites and blogs have always existed. Geocities and Angelfire and a million little personal pages defined the early personal web and were just as valuable a presence in online communities as blogs or forums. Personal static sites are our indie blogging legacy. We should cherish them and be excited that they’re having a resurgence.

Is the blog a public forum?

Some people will blog for their careers. Some people will blog for profit. Some people blog professionally, like book and game reviewers. Some people need an engaged audience to achieve what they’re setting out to achieve.

Your average blogger is not this person. They’re writing because they want to write. There’s no reason to do it otherwise.

People should have the ability to define and curate how their writing exists in the ecosystem of the indieweb. We should all get to have conversations and communication on our own terms. We all deserve to have a curated space where our own work matters more than others’. It isn’t everyone’s goal to be a public figure who other people feel entitled to comment on.

This isn’t anti-community: It’s pro-social to advocate for yourself and prioritize what you want out of your public persona.

I still love comments!

I love comments, just like I love webmentions and emails and pings. I get so excited when I see a notification, because it means that someone was genuinely affected by something I wrote!

I’m a little baffled by how polarized people have been on this topic, because it simply would never have occurred to me to dictate how other people have to exist online. I like comments–but I also have them locked down. They’re heavily spam-filtered; they’re fully moderated (I have to approve every new commenter). Anything short of that makes them unusable and a burden. This site is a hobby I have, and I don’t welcome my hobbies being made into burdens, or obligations.

Something that I love about Blaugust is how it encourages a blogging community and these types of interactions. We often exist in our own corners, doing our own thing, and it’s hard for a newer hobbyist to get into the community because it’s so ill-defined and wobbly. But to the people who can’t imagine the point of a blog without comments: I invite you to write something with comments turned off. Consider how it feels to write purely for yourself, on a topic you care deeply about. Consider how it might feel to say something controversial or bold without the fear of how others will react. Give it a try, if only to understand why these types of blogs exist.