Like many, I prefer subscribing to RSS feeds instead of being force-fed by an algorithm. However, sometimes I wish I could comment and/or chat with others about the contents of specific articles in the feed.

I know it’s possible to post a link to the article in a link aggregator like Lemmy and have a discussion, but that takes effort to post links and not every article in a feed would be submitted. It also doesn’t curate the discussion to only the feeds a user is interested in.

So, my idea is that in a feed, tapping/clicking on the article would show comments people have left and allow the reader to make their own comments/replies. The comments could also be available in a read-only state via api or their own RSS feed, so authors could easily embed them.

I did a little searching and couldn’t find anything like this. If this seems useful to anybody else, I think I’d like to write it. So… thoughts?

  • everett@lemmy.ml
    4·
    9 days ago

    Another day, another reminder to curse the vacuum left behind by Google Reader. We had built-in RSS commenting 15+ years ago (though no API, I think).

  • mbirth@lemmy.mlEnglish
    21·
    9 days ago

    Part of that is done in my favourite iOS/macOS RSS client News Explorer. It downloads and shows comments left for an article, if that article was posted on a supported platform (Wordpress, YouTube, etc.). But this is read-only so far.

    Ninja edit: Also, IIRC, there were some generic comment browser plugins for websites. Basically, similar to Disqus, but for whatever website you’re currently browsing. But I guess these fell victim to several laws around mandatory moderation of user comments and stuff like that…

    • baggachipzOP
      1·
      9 days ago

      I thought about Disqus, but the issue is that each blog owner has to enable/embed it into their blog. Disqus also fully enshittified and isn’t used much anymore, far as I can tell.