What would a sociable comment system look like?

Natalie’s vision of a sociable web is exactly what I’m hoping for in the post-Cohost blog era. Her post got me thinking about what a comments system for an indie, blog-based web could look like.

• Obviously the main attraction is leaving comments, which should be tree-style.
• I also think it would be nice to have a Cohost-style like button^[1].
• Posters should have a display name and a link to their homepage(s).
• For abuse prevention reasons I think I’d want “all comments go into an approve queue” as the default or only behavior. Probably there’s some more anti-spam magic you’d want; that’s a losing game if you need to beat every spammer but I bet you can beat something like 80% of the spam with 20% of the effort.
• I’d also like to have the ability to mute/block a poster across all sites in the comment network. The more sites that use the same comment network, the more useful mute/block becomes.
• On the same token, cross-site signin would be nice. That way it’s pretty frictionless to like a post or leave a short comment, even on a blog you don’t frequent.

There are three main reasons I’m not planning on building this, even though I want it to exist:

1. You probably want a comment system to send email, so you know if your comment has been approved or you have replies. Sending email at any scale beyond personal seems like a bit of a headache.
2. I don’t want to be responsible for the social aspects. Technically I’m happy to spin up a server and provide a little support, but I don’t want to be making moderation decisions like “should we ban this user?” (outside the scope of my own blog).
3. I don’t want to market it. If I want the 15th standard to take off, I’d have to convince a lot of people to use it, and that seems like work I wouldn’t have fun doing.