Using Bubble for gemlog comments. Is this Crazy?

Mar 11 · 9 months ago · 👍 6PakAL

10 Comments ↓

I'll add the first comment here, just to open the conversation and welcome everyone who wants to say anything.

cheers, and thanks for coming by!

I'll be the first to say that I love this idea of using bubbles for comments. While blog comments of old (man, it really has been decades...) wasn't really my thing, this does work as a Gemini way to replace them.

Glad you came up with this idea. I hope it takes off.

I don't think this would be crazy. Perhaps overly complex technically, since people have done simple comment systems with way less code and fewer features.

Commenting works better in a multiuser system like Bubble, so it is better suited than the "gemlog reply posts via Cosmos" method.

I'll think about adding some features to Bubble to make this use case more convenient, perhaps adding a way to create these comment threads via a single request, like when submitting posts to Antenna.

@skyjake : I was considering asking for your "permission" to do these experiments beforehand, I hope this comment thread doesn't bring excessive load with it ;)

Then: yeah, it was a bit of manual work (mostly, due to how I write my gemlog, I had to create this thread, get the url, publish the gemlog with the link, get the post link and edit this), but nothing a person with an account here can't do easily.

"Thinking out loud": not sure if there would be a way to "create a thread on the fly if it doesn't exist", or have a link with defaults for "not listed in general view/feed" prepopulated. even without those, this seems easy enough.

@6PakAL : glad you like the idea. After connecting the dots, it seemed easy enough to do. I'm almost surprised people are not doing it. Or maybe people are doing it, and I just don't know about it :D

I wasn't a big commenter back in the day, either, except for that lapse of time where all my friends had a blog, MSN space (did I hallucinate those?) or thing-of-the-day and we would spend the days making jokes in the comments...

Nice. I still prefer discussions to take place on fedi/Mastodon (so I am basically doing the same thing: adding a fedi thread to each of my blog posts) - but staying within Gemini has its appeal, too.

@jmcs: create a thread on the fly if it doesn't exist

That is a great idea actually. Certainly sounds convenient.

@skyjake ... it sounded like a good idea when I thought of it (wiki soft used to do this, just put a link on your text and done), but I don't know how well it could work in practice. What 'ID' should I use for the url? is it going to be 'slug' based? how do I make sure it doesn't exist already? how much complexity does it add? is it worth it?...

and so on. Honestly, I don't think it's worth it, it adds complexity for a use case that would be too niche and, honestly, takes like 10 seconds altogether anyway to do now by hand...

@jmcs Maybe it isn't that complex... The post URI that is being submitted would be the unique ID, so the system would just have to look for a post thread with that URI as a link inside the user's own /u/-subspace.

I mean: how would I, as a user, know which unique ID to use in my link, to create one? (it could be already in use, so I'd be linking to something, instead of creating one, I could create an integer overflow if I send something stupid, what do I know ...)That's why I think it's almost better to visit, create a link manually, and copy it ..