Would Dreamwidth/Livejournal comment pages be possible?

[nancylebov]

Given my druthers, I wouldn't have to check comments about the same post in two different places. Of course, at this point, DW/LJ is only part of the problem, what with people cross-posting the same things to DW, LW, G+, and FB, but the DW/LJ problem is one I run into more often, and perhaps relatively solvable because both of them use the same open-source software.

What I'm imagining is a page with comments from both sites (no doubt with the source marked with a stripe or an icon or something) with the threads in order of posting. (I'd like unthreaded [new|old] as an option, too. And a pony.)

I'm not sure whether this is an option best activated by the reader or by creator of the post, or as an option for both.

I'm inclined to think this would be a lot harder to maintain the conversation for flocked posts because some people might have permission to read at one site but not the other, so lets assume it's only available for public posts.

If it's possible at all, I assume it would also work for deadjournal, insane journal, and anyone else who's using the same software.

Comments

[kore]

I don't think so, but it sounds nice. I think DW has said explicitly there is no way for them to do the RSS feed of flocked LJ posts, so reading your LJ flist from your DW is out.

The past year or so online here for me has been this unhappy non-balancing act between trying to put up with the shitty policies of LJ while getting two feeds of identical posts with different comments, which I personally dislike, while also seeing those comments further diluted by people xposting far and wide - or trying to stay off LJ and feeling more and more cut off both from the people who still post only to LJ, and people who are on LJ and xposting to DW but read primarily through LJ because "nobody's at" DW. Neither option feels very good.

[nancylebov]

I'm only talking about being able to read the comments on fully public posts. I wasn't even hoping to read a combined version of my flists.

By the way, Kore shows up in greek letters in my email notifications, and I think that's really cool.

[kore]

Ohh DURR, excuse my meandering then!

Hee, yes, still love the Greek alphabet.

[matgb]

There is a proposed inter site protocal, called IIRC Salmon, to take cooments from wherever they're made and put them at the original source post, but it's not very popular with the sites you'd need it on and I doubt it'll have legs.

FWIW, I've tried this and it works, if you import from LJ regularly, it will import comments from crossposted entries and put them on the original, so you can get all comments to crossposted entries back here, but it's a manual process that isn't automatable.

[twistedchick]

I am entirely not knowledgeable about these things -- but... if you had both pages set up on your own site (as opposed to here) couldn't that be done?

[siderea]

"Possible"? Anything involving computers is possible, given enough resources.

In this case, yes, I can see how to do it technologically, though it wouldn't be able to update in real time or LJ (and possibly DW) would ban its connection due to violating the bot policy.

But:
1) It would involve a third site storing your log-in credentials, which would be either
1a) A site you run yourself on your own web host, or
1b) A site run by a third party.

2) It would involve a truly epic coding project.

I don't think anybody's this motivated.

[geekosaur]

Dreamwidth has actually considered doing this, and (as I understand it) rejected it because of (a) possibly needing to store credentials for other sites, (b) load of gathering this stuff on every access of your read page (or worse, load of always doing so on all users', or even just active users' read pages), (c) the expected reaction of LiveJournal would almost certainly be to cut off Dreamwidth's access completely.

[madfilkentist]

This sounds possible, given the LJ API, but one problem comes to mind. Let's say it's done by a website harvesting comments from both LJ and DW (just those two to keep things simple) and merging them, labeling their sources so that redundancy or commenting at cross-purposes doesn't look so strange. The difficulty is with replying to the comments. Either the comment-merging site would have to be somehow able to post back to both LJ and DW, which raises security issues, especially for commenters who don't have accounts on both, or you'd have to reply to a comment by going back to the LJ or DW site.

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

It's technically possible and not necessarily all that hard, but if such a site gets popular LJ could quite plausibly disallow it via updated Terms of Service and block it.

There's also the option of doing all of it clientside via Greasemonkey/user javascript, which would feel kludgier but can neither be commercialized nor blocked.

[reddragdiva]

AIUI, Dreamwidth would love to offer this, but they consider that LJ would cut them off.

Cut them off?

[happypete.livejournal.com]

In his post-LJ work, I know bradfitz worked on something called PubSubHubBub that would have facilitated exactly this sort of crossover commenting. Basically a comment would get a unique identifier, and all of the crossover sites that subscribed to new comments would be notified so that they could add it. The identifier would prevent comments from getting "looped back" to their source, and also allow things like threading to be rendered correctly.

LJ is fighting hard to stay relevant...why would they cut off support to DW?