Replied to Not enough people want Webmentions by Jeremy Cherfas (Jeremy Cherfas)

A little while ago (on 19 October, to be precise) someone mentioned commento.io, an open source commenting system for websites. It looked interesting, so I tried to leave a comment on the post that mentioned it. Despite a few problems with login, I managed it, and asked whether Commento could play nicely with webmentions. No reply there, but I also took the matter up with support at Commento.

Given that it’s a paid service, I do see the potential that it could be viewed as an odd bit of competition. But at the same time, if it were my business, I’d take some leadership over the topic and work at building what might bring the product more value. Customers aren’t always communicative and building the things based on stated customer desires isn’t always the best way to go because the customer doesn’t always know what they want. A service provider needs to know the space, potential values, and provide the vision to get their company where it needs to be. Given this, their response seems to be a bit of a cop out. I remember thinking much the same thing about Disqus a few years back. I suspect if they knew their businesses well they’d see the imminent value and know that “if you build it [t]he[y] will come.“