Thank you, Bhagpuss, for your kind words!

As you say- seeing a comment on a post I’ve written on my blog is a kind of ‘fuel’ for me. A comment or even a ‘like’ (a feature currently broken on this blog) makes me feel like the void is a slightly more friendly place, and maybe a bit less void-like.

Re: commenting difficulty. I really like it when I visit a blog and find out that, through whatever magic (probably involving dastardly cookies and some kind of satanic rituals), it ‘knows’ who I am already. I type my comment and hit reply- this is the way it should be.

WordPress seems to have features that facilitate that kind of ‘ease of use’ commenting behaviour as does Blogspot (or at least your blog). Some people seem to not enable or explicitly disable this functionality in their blog’s configuration- I’m not sure why. And there are a lot of the ‘Indieweb’ sites that either can’t or won’t use any kind of social login, or which disable commenting entirely.

Blog commenting authentication is something I should really investigate more: make it as easy as possible for my visitors to have their say.