Comments on a static website, powered by Mastodon
Comments on a static website, powered by Mastodon
I’ve been wanting to experiment with adding a comments section to posts and pages on my website for a while now. Rather than using one of those comments-as-a-service companies, I figured a lighter-weight solution would be re-using a social tool I’m already invested in: Mastodon.
I hope this becomes more common
That's really cool! It reminds me a bit of Cactus comments building on Matrix rooms — but different protocol, obviously 🙂
I've been using https://utteranc.es/, same concept but using Github issues as comment. This is interesting, especially if there's a way to handle each user's instances.
Just looking at the Utterances site, this sticks out:
No lock-in. All data stored in GitHub issues.
...so you can just migrate those comments somewhere else if you don't want to use Github anymore? If not, I'd call that textbook lock-in.
For what it's worth: I self-host gitea, and it gives me the possibility to import not only repos but also issues, projects, etc from GitHub, gitlab, bit bucket, and a handful of others.
I don't know if Utterances can work with gitea's API. If it does, then in theory you should be able to migrate to gitea from GitHub for this use case.
What about blog spam though? Surely this would relinquish controls like moderation for your site?
OP here: I haven't tested how exactly this would work but I think with some tweak to the scraping script I think I could have it hide muted comments pretty easily. From there moderation would also fall back to how things work on Mastodon- if someone is posting abusive comments I can report the post and have the instance admins take whatever action necessary against the infringer.
You might like Commento which is FOSS. You can self-host it (or fire it onto a free or low cost cloud host), and fun. It's more like a Lemmy/reddit format (comment up/down votes can be enabled) than masto but maybe you'll enjoy it.
Users can comment anonymously or you can enable basic verification steps. Decent moderation for if spam bots find you. Etc.
ETA I used to host my instance on Heroku's free tier and it was more than enough for what little traffic was coming to my site.
As another option Remark42
I've been using one of the Javascript variants of this for a while. While that is a little heavier weight for the client than this completely static solution, it's ultimately just a few kilobytes and minimal processing that's fast even on old devices.