51–60 of 115 posts
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>Everything, including hosting and workers, costs me zero. Your setup sounds cool. Do you host it on a home lab or something?
Just a free plan on Cloudflare (CF in the comment above also means CloudFlare). Zero maintenance. I push to Github and CF deploys static pages to CDN.
1. Accept comments via email, CGI scripts, server-side program or by any other means that suits you. A simple hack that requires no server-side scripting: if you run your own web server, you can submit comments as GET query parameters logged in access.log, then extract them using grep, sed, etc. Personally, I use a server-side program to accept POST requests and write comments to a text file on the web server.
2. Review submitted comments. Delete spam.
3. Add comments to your website source repository as .md, .html or whatever format you use, similar to how you add blog posts as content files to your source.
4. Render comments alongside the rest of your site using your static site generator. Depending on the nature of your static site generator, this may require using or creating a template or layout that iterates over the comments and renders them.
It is a fairly hands-on workflow, so it may not suit everybody, but this is how I do it for my personal website. I see two main benefits of this approach. Since the review is manual in step 2, no spam can ever make it to my website. Step 3 ensures comments live entirely under my control, so I never need to worry about migrating them between platforms in the future.
It's very themeable. If for some reason you want your comments to look like Hacker News, there's a theme here: See the playground here: https://bluesky-comments.netlify.app/theme/
After doing that to my blog too, I added a comment section to any OSM place on https://cartes.app . You can now review places with an ATproto account. Any app can implement the same lexicon. Review data belongs to users, as JSON on their PDS.
What about those EU anti-hate laws which punish the owner of the website instead, if comments are not filtered? I'm asking of curiosity, when it started I disabled commenting on my web page
Twitter split into x, bluesky, and truthsocial. By picking one, you now allow comments from only 1/3 of your readers. Maybe that's intentional, a sort of ad hoc political filter or gate. But I think it's noteworthy.
Seems like a fun growth hacking way to grow Bluesky as well. I made an account just to test it out, haha
There is no question that for-profit social network projects will end up as Twitter did. The only question is when. Ideally, the comment system should be either self-hosted or more fediverse-like. The rest is a temporary compromise that will sink in the sands of time.
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Not sure why above is downvoted. You’re right. Google Trends reveals how much of a flash in the pan Mastodon was post-Twitter: https://imgur.com/a/i2Vq9FR Social media needs to be very simple for the masses to adopt. The elevator pitch needs to be one sentence and must not include the word “server”.
Mastodon doesn't need to be "adopted by the masses" to be successful. I and plenty of other people are perfectly fine happy with it (and I use Mastodon comments for my blog.) I don't understand the knee-jerk reactions whenever Mastodon comes up here. Someone always has to declare it dead, someone always has to rant about "leftist politics" and "fascist moderators." And then they usually suggest Nostr which is far mor…
I am working on https://libmap.org where you can add posts to a map via Bluesky and mastodon.social.
> There are other services that could be used for this purpose instead. Notably, I could embed replies from the social media formerly known as Twitter. Twitter split into x, bluesky, and truthsocial. By picking one, you now allow comments from only 1/3 of your readers. Maybe that's intentional, a sort of ad hoc political filter or gate. But I think it's noteworthy.
Readers are free to create accounts on whichever platforms they choose, in order to follow you. And publishes are free to choose which platforms they endorse.
Notably, of the three mentioned, ATProto is by far the most open and extensible protocol, and less subject to the whims of an addled billionaire.