Running the stuff on someone else’s computer still requires a dedicated team for “something serious”, unless you stuff everything in specific “serverless” platforms, in which case you’re still paying for admins, just not yours.

I don’t think “they should”, but if you’re willing / able to at least make a decent description of what it would entail, how it would work, and how it would benefit users, and possibly contribute in some other way, it might happen!

(It’ll take more than a sentence and a half from the sidelines, I think)

Exactly! As far as I’m concerned, robots.txt should be enough: I tell your bot to stay the hell away, or not, and your bot obeys. What it scrapes for doesn’t matter, IMO.

We don’t need more standards and rules for assholes to ignore, we need assholes to adhere to the rules.

And then there’s Discourse as well, to make it even more confusing. 🤣

I’ve heard of that, yeah, but I’m still not convinced a web page and chat mix well. They’re different in pace. That might just be me, though. 😁

I don’t know about decentralized, nor am I convinced that it should be, you’re responding to something on one page, I don’t think “decentralized” adds value here.

If you really insist on that, there’s several people who tack a fediverse thread onto a post. Mastodon, is seen often, I personally added a GoToSocial thread fetcher to my blog, I assume Lemmy could work as well.

As for non-decentralized but open, there’s Comments as someone already mentioned, and I’m personally using Isso, which presents itself as a drop-in replacement for Disqus.

Matrix is a chat protocol, not a comment system. You might shoehorn it into that role, but it’s never going to fit well, IMO.