No no no.
The $3 is to incur a cost on would-be spammers. I don’t think most Fedi users appreciate how much work goes into combatting spam at scale. Signal has hundreds of millions of users. Requiring a phone number limits the blast radius of successful spam campaigns. Removing that requirement means making it much easier for spammers to register.
You aren’t giving them your CC#. You’re giving it to Google. Which, presumably, already has it.
Could you elaborate how was their response would be making your comment section a ‘dumping ground’?
My blog exists for me to publish my writing. If other people want their own writing published, they should publish it on their own blog. “Mopar” clearly was capable of doing so.
Was it not directly relevant to your issues with XMPP and OMEMO?
Does relevance matter? If so, why?
What was your reasoning for not approving it?
What is your reasoning for thinking I owe you or anyone an explanation? My blog, my rules.
however what is less known is that blogger removed a response in the comments from an OMEMO developer who clarified some things (you can it read here), which personally I think was rather odd/bad faith of them to do.
My blog hasn’t had comments enabled for years. People can write their own blog posts if they want to respond to something. Not becoming a dumping ground for other people isn’t “bad faith”.
Furthermore, I didn’t remove a response. I’ve always held comments in a moderation queue back when I did allow them, and I didn’t approve it. That’s all.
The reason for the moderation queue is obvious to most people, but if you find yourself unaware: Being openly queer, or part of the furry community, or both opens you up to a lot of harassment networks that try to cause grief. They might dox you and post this in a blog comment so it shows up on search engines, for example. So I never wanted to deal with that retroactively.
It’s not your or anyone else’s place to “understand” arbitrary decisions I made years ago. Whatever point you want to emphasize is moot anyway: Comments are disabled and users are encouraged to blog independently if they want to remark on something I wrote.
Consider yourself corrected on the “removed” remark.