Colin Walker

When writing about ownership I explored the difference between comments and replies and that part of it was context.

I started thinking about that again but in a wider sense.

I've never really liked that Medium turned all replies into full posts so that they showed as standalone items in your feed.

It didn't matter if it was an essay length response or just a quick one-liner; they all became "posts" in their own right.

Wrong!

But, thinking about it, this is what's mirrored, and encouraged, by the #indieweb where a reply is designed to be written on your own site and replicated as a comment on the original via a webmention. Regardless of length.

I can't complain about one but countenance the other.

"There are different types of reply and they should be treated accordingly."

There has to be a line, a point where a comment is just that and not a reply. It's a question of semantics but not everyone's answer to "what is a comment and where does it belong?" will be the same.