I think you're misunderstanding the proposal. Comments and moderation are independent of the site, not on the site.
If distributed commenting and moderation is too complex to implement, then we need to move to network designs that make it simpler.
It's something that doesn't actually exist yet, but maybe will.
I'm sure you'll have hoards of sites signing up for that.
[1] This add-on actually exists for YouTube/Reddit: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reddit-on-you....
In an ideal comment system I believe that articles, comments and moderation events should come from three different, decentralized streams (like Atom) that the end user can subscribe to individually and that are joined at the end users client.
What he is asking for is the exact opposite of "the added legitimacy of the site itself". He's asking for a user interface to integrate content that does not come from the site itself.
That would be a lot cooler than another comment moderation system, of which there are already multiple open-source implementations. Could someone at least provide an argument of why Mozilla Talk is better than the existing solutions?
1. Aggregate comments from Mastodon, personal blogs, etc.
2. Interact with these comments by upvoting and applying filters, etc (i.e. moderate)
3. Publish your moderation actions and apply the same type of metadata from other moderators (and moderation aggregators).
If Talk has any value, it's to serve as a starting point for Tool 2.
"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.