Replies instead of comments 📢

Replies instead of comments 📢 Bubbles aims to help you find interesting posts on small personal blogs, and then to send you over to the original blog to read them. Earlier this month I removed comments, and with them the Hot tab and the two comment feeds. In their place, Bubbles now links blog posts that answer each other. Replies to Bubbles' Fediverse posts showed up under each entry as comments. That gave every listed post a potential comment section, including posts on blogs whose writers had turned comments off on purpose. I think a personal blog should get to decide that for itself. Comments were also rarely used: about 80 in a month, next to more than 3,300 votes. They were also the hardest part of Bubbles to run. It checked the Fediverse for new replies every minute, fetched the thread whenever someone opened an entry, kept deleted replies in sync and needed its own admin moderation tools. Taking all of that out removed over 4,000 lines of code. The nicest conversations I've…

Commenting on Bubbles has been removed. Why? If you want to talk about this post, write to the author, use the comments on their blog if it has them, or reply with a "RE:" post on your own blog. Suggestions? feedback@bubbles.town