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Adding Mastodon Comments to Your Blog

beej.us

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Re: Adding Mastodon Comments to Your Blog

#51

Post by mariusor »

foo42 wrote: post #45

I've been considering trying to get to a similar result, but considering making my actual blog _be_ a (minimal) ActivityPub sever with a si gle user/actor such that posting to the blog is publishing an ActivityPub post, and have replies to that post coming directly into the blogs own inbox, then show up as comments. Anyone else weighed up the two approaches, I'm still on the fence tbh.

I'm working on something like that here: https://git.sr.ht/~mariusor/oni

However since I'm not a very good frontend dev, posting to this is currently done through a CLI application without great UX. :D If you're interested, I would *love* to collaborate with someone on it.

PS. a running instance where I post now and then is https://marius.federated.id

Re: Adding Mastodon Comments to Your Blog

#52

Post by BeetleB »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #46
beej71 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could add a button to swap the comments out for ads and tracking. ;) To your point, though, I don't expect anyone without an account already to post, but my target audience largely already has such accounts.

> I don't expect anyone without an account already to post, but my target audience largely already has such accounts This is a ridiculous expectation. Virtually nobody uses Mastodon, especially since BlueSky now is the open platform of choice. But even without this, Twitter-like websites for me and a lot of other people have absolutely no usecase, despite being in the audience who could read your blog. Expecting all…

> Virtually nobody uses Mastodon

You may want to look around you...

Re: Adding Mastodon Comments to Your Blog

#53

Post by BeetleB »

gkbrk wrote: post #40
akerr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would prefer to create a new account on every blog you visit and wish to comment on?

Usually blogs don't require creating an account to leave comments. Why present this false alternative when the common thing to do is just leaving a comment without creating an account?

> Usually blogs don't require creating an account to leave comments.

Even back before 2010, almost all blogging platforms had an option that would let the owner require log in to comment.

And it was fairly common, because of spam.

Re: Adding Mastodon Comments to Your Blog

#54

Post by iLoveOncall »

BeetleB wrote: post #52
iLoveOncall wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't expect anyone without an account already to post, but my target audience largely already has such accounts This is a ridiculous expectation. Virtually nobody uses Mastodon, especially since BlueSky now is the open platform of choice. But even without this, Twitter-like websites for me and a lot of other people have absolutely no usecase, despite being in the audience who could read your blog. Expecting all…

> Virtually nobody uses Mastodon You may want to look around you...

Less than a million monthly active users: https://joinmastodon.org/servers

This is massively down from 2 years ago where it was 1.7M: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/10bimq2/comment/j...

You may want to look around you...

Re: Adding Mastodon Comments to Your Blog

#55

Post by fsflover »

lukev wrote: post #33
Tepix wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But bluesky is a proprietary service based in the US. A less privacy friendly choice for your readers/commenters.

The protocol is fully open and adoption is picking up rapidly. You can easily host your own data server in your preferred jurisdiction if that is important to you.

"Easily" is an overstatement. Where are all the independent servers?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42215410

Re: Adding Mastodon Comments to Your Blog

#56

Post by fragmede »

asimpletune wrote: post #35

I’ve seen a few times the option to email your comment, which I thought was a really elegant solution. So much in fact that I built that into my own site https://spenc.es/writing/email-as-a-commenting-system/#comme...

huh. that provokes a vaguely uncomfortable feeling in me for some reason. I suppose you could also setup an sms gateway and accept comments that way too but hm.

Re: Adding Mastodon Comments to Your Blog

#57

Post by asimpletune »

fragmede wrote: post #56
asimpletune wrote: post #35

I’ve seen a few times the option to email your comment, which I thought was a really elegant solution. So much in fact that I built that into my own site https://spenc.es/writing/email-as-a-commenting-system/#comme...

huh. that provokes a vaguely uncomfortable feeling in me for some reason. I suppose you could also setup an sms gateway and accept comments that way too but hm.

Yeah, I hear you. If it helps, the emails are anonymized with an hmac.

Re: Adding Mastodon Comments to Your Blog

#58

Post by rchaud »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #47
stared wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a similar approach to linking to a comment thread, see e.g. Reddit links from https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves . At the same time, I am an opportunist — sometimes it is Reddit, sometimes it is ix Xm, and sometimes it is here, the Hacker News. Different posts resonate with different audiences; and I don't want to link to a ghost town. One issue is that there is no such thing as "the default platf…

> One issue is that there is no such thing as "the default platform for discussions" Isn't this what the various linkback mechanisms tried to solve? It seems like the ideal solution: let anyone comment wherever they want, from a tweet to their own follow-up blog post, and connect them all via automated notifications.

It was, but the explosion of free hosted blogs quickly led to linkbacks being 90% scam sites instead of genuine responses.

Re: Adding Mastodon Comments to Your Blog

#59

Post by lukev »

fsflover wrote: post #55
lukev wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The protocol is fully open and adoption is picking up rapidly. You can easily host your own data server in your preferred jurisdiction if that is important to you.

"Easily" is an overstatement. Where are all the independent servers? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42215410

A) That article is from was 3 months ago, the network has grown almost 50% since then. B) You can set up your own PDS, right now. If you're comfortable with Docker it should take you under an hour: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds

Re: Adding Mastodon Comments to Your Blog

#60

Post by fasbiner »

brenns10 wrote: post #29
fasbiner wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you don't trust your instance admin, why did you sign up with your instance? Probably because you told them it was a cool OSS twitter alternative and not something that takes all of social media's moderation and privacy and content problems and multiplies them by the number of instances you join without any of the legal protections associated with being able to file civil or criminal complaints against an identif…

Haha it definitely takes the content moderation problems and distributes then across all the instances. But that's kind of the whole point. You can join an instance that moderates content in accordance to your preferences, rather than dealing with the weird policies of Meta/X. I'm sorry you don't like it though.

It seems like we agree: the whole point of Mastadon is to do something that nearly all users don't want and actively fear - being forced to trust both the intentions and the opsec of anonymous individuals who are effectively beyond the law, and being blamed for trusting them if anything goes wrong ever.

Do you comply with the CCPA or GDPR, or are the users on your instance empowered by being given the "choice" to give you unlimited access, use, and retention of their data without their informed consent, even when it violates civil and criminal law?

If you think data privacy laws are wrong and intend to violate them, you should say so in a way that makes informed consent possible. If you're comfortable with rationalizing violating informed consent in some ways, it kind of implies the "content in accordance with your preferences" may similarly contain content of non-consensual acts that are also illegal.

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