[lorean_victor]

the thing is, with no intermediaries involved, more specifically, without any proper "search engines" (or "aggregators") involved, the network will suffer greatly from a content discovery problem regardless (as the fediverse currently is, IMO).

with presence of such services, the problem of comments (and reactions in general) can be solved too. if a poster is ok with engaging with potentially hostile content, then they can get reactions to their posts from aggregators that aren't heavy handed on moderation. if they don't want to bother with such interactions, then they can choose safer aggregators. if they want, they can only pull reactions from feeds they are already subscribed to, similar to private posts on twitter.

[cousin_it]

I'm more thinking about the social side of things. When comments follow the pull model, you get the pingback problem of old: most "comments" will be links to blog posts, themselves stuffed with more promotional links and so on. The only way to avoid it and have comments look like a somewhat nice garden is to allow post authors to say: please write text comments and don't stuff them with links, or you won't pass moderation on my blog. In other words, the push model. In my experience that's the best solution to this particular problem.

[lorean_victor]

I think that's an issue of tools at your disposal to create content (including comments) rather than their distribution model (e.g. pull vs push). If your main method of saying stuff is through a blogpost, ofc you'll end up in the situation you've described. If the tools at everyone's disposal are textboxes that just work, people will use that.