You say that, but have you considered the downsides?
Imagine you know someone in the public eye, let's say a musician, with their own website. They enable comments, and site now has comments all over it that they have no editorial control over whatsoever. People are posting a high amount of offensive content. What do you advise that this musician does?
The musician can display whatever they want on their website; they don't have to host content they don't like. In the "dream" commenting system, the comments are independent; you can apply your own filters and fetch comments from sources the site owner may not approve of.
I disagree. I don't think this is like that at all. Especially given now that comments are displayed on the actual site in question. If you're going to say it's something separate, then now you're talking about Twitter or, more likely, Mastodon.
> Imagine you know someone in the public eye, let's say a musician, with their own website. They enable comments
In my mind it would be the users, not the site owners that would enable the comments.
> People are posting a high amount of offensive content. What do you advise that this musician does?
My advice in this case would be to create a moderator stream that the end users can subscribe to. Perhaps some mechanisms could be put into the system to make it easy for site owners to suggest a "default" moderation stream that the end-users can opt-in to.
In this case the site owners would be able to moderate comments through voluntary cooperation with its users, but it wouldn't be able to censor opinions that it didn't agree with, because the end users would always be in control of how its stream is filtered and would always be able to verify that on-topic posts aren't censored.
Isn't this now Mastodon? If it's not actually connected to the site in question?
"My advice in this case would be to create a moderator stream that the end users can subscribe to."
That sounds like a pretty complex thing to do, which doesn't solve the problem of, "The comments on my site are overrun with people posting racial slurs."
"In this case the site owners would be able to moderate comments through voluntary cooperation with its users, but it wouldn't be able to censor opinions that it didn't agree with, because the end users would always be in control of how its stream is filtered and would always be able to verify that on-topic posts aren't censored."
I don't believe that's actually a problem, though. You can always go make your own site if you want your voice heard.
We're talking about something like Twitter or Mastodon but (a) can be found using the original URL of the site, as in IPFS or content-addressable networking; and (b) uses distributed opt-in moderation, meta-moderation, and filtering; like a decentralized AdBlock.
It's something that doesn't actually exist yet, but maybe will.
Imagine you know someone in the public eye, let's say a musician, with their own website. They enable comments, and site now has comments all over it that they have no editorial control over whatsoever. People are posting a high amount of offensive content. What do you advise that this musician does?