Instead make it "opt in"
The same way people browse posts to respond to, people can browse people to allow comments.
Friend requests and all that.
In the current world, especially post-2016, there is a greater than 50% chance any person (or bot) openly allowed to comment without approval is going to offend.
Unless you are in a closed community, in which case all the twitter models are unnecessary anyway.
if so that’s the UX element i was talking about. i follow like 200 people: i’m not gonna create 200 accounts for that.
(i don’t mean to degrade your work: it’s always cool to see what people build when solving a problem they’re passionate about.)
Account management is admittedly one of the weak parts of Haven's UX right now, but everything needs to be source-initiated or else spam is an even bigger issue. (That was my previous experience trying to do this on Wordpress). I've got ambitions of adopting IndieAuth and building Haven as an IndieAuth identity (IndieAuth is like Oauth, but you sign is as your domain instead of a user @ google/facebook/github/whatever). This would let account creation be more of a whitelisting process--just paste the names of the people (people identified as domains) to which you want to grant access, and authentication is handled by their own domains.
comments. either you destroy UX, or you suffer intolerable levels of spam, or you roll your own pseudo captcha (“please enter the name of the original grass-type starter pokemon to comment”) that only works as long as your blog stays small and niche.