I added a Bluesky comment section to my blog

301 pointsposted 13 days ago
by hydroxideOH-
(micahcantor.com)

114 Comments

susam

13 days ago

If you are rendering your blog or website with a static site generator, you could also consider importing comments as content files into your website source and then rendering them as part of the build. The full workflow would look like this:

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.

RestartKernel

13 days ago

I can see how that would work. For a small website, you're probably only looking at a few comments per day at absolute most, and you'll be reviewing them anyway to filter/approve them. (And the implementation lends to easy automation, since you just need to programatically update the Markdown file instead.)

andai

13 days ago

>1. Accept comments via email

I only accept comments via Fax ;)

smnplk

13 days ago

I only accept human written letters.

manuelmoreale

13 days ago

You say this ironically but as a result of my blog I started receiving letters from people and it’s so rewarding.

Such an amazing way to interact with people.

theshrike79

11 days ago

I have a vague recollection that 4chan basically works like this. They just generate static pages on every comment because that's more efficient than trying to have a fancy database.

kurtis_reed

13 days ago

Sounds terrible

susam

13 days ago

Not for you then. That is perfectly fine. I have been using this approach for seven years now, and it has worked very well for me.

For anyone else who is interested in taking a look, here is my setup:

* The server-side program that processes the POST requests: https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/0.5.0/form.lisp#L254...

* The static site generator reads the comment files and renders them alongside the rest of the website: https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/0.5.0/site.lisp#L869...

* End result: https://susam.net/comments/

The last link shows the consolidated comments page that lists all approved comments posted across my entire personal website. The 'View original comment' link under each comment points to the individual comment page for each post.

jesse_dot_id

13 days ago

I like your idea and stole it but used Mastodon instead :)

https://jesse.id/blog/posts/you-can-now-comment-on-my-blog-f...

BeetleB

13 days ago

People have been doing it with Mastodon (and perhaps Bluesky) for years.

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Jan/adding-fediverse-comme...

mikae1

13 days ago

I'd love to see a combination of the two as one comment section.

BeetleB

12 days ago

Well, Bluesky and Mastodon users can communicate with one another - as long as both parties opt in.

https://fed.brid.gy/

It works. The instructions on that site could be a bit more organized, though (example: I didn't have a profile picture so it wouldn't bridge my comments - it's listed on the page but you have to search for it).

f311a

13 days ago

My blog is fully static and I have a 50-line CF worker script that sends comments to me which I import directly to markdown of a blog post. There are ways to do comments without embedding.

sigmar

13 days ago

Would be neat to automate the comment-with-markdown as a commit/PR? Like using Pull request as comment moderation

JCattheATM

13 days ago

Care to share a link or some more info?

f311a

13 days ago

How it works:

* CF worker on a subdomain that handles POST requests. Basically, a JS function that handles incoming requests.

* It stores comments in CF KV and sends me a copy to telegram

* All I need to do is copy it to Markdown (can be automated, but I manually approve the comments in case of spam)

* In Markdown, I'm using frontmatter to store arbitrary JSON data

* To avoid automated spam, I have a few tricks: do not expose the submit URL in HTML (insert it via JS) and calculate a simple checksum so that automated software that does not execute JS won't be able to post. Such software usually targets Wordpress blogs by scraping them from Google. I get zero spam from it.

Everything, including hosting and workers, costs me zero.

Example: https://rushter.com/blog/zsh-shell/

MarcelOlsz

13 days ago

>Everything, including hosting and workers, costs me zero.

Your setup sounds cool. Do you host it on a home lab or something?

f311a

13 days ago

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.

MarcelOlsz

13 days ago

Ah awesome thanks. I've been using Netlify to do the same. CF scares me lol.

tclancy

13 days ago

Would be cooler if it really was ColdFusion. Of course, 50 lines wouldn’t get you very far.

tombert

13 days ago

Tangential, but recently I dove down the ColdFusion rabbit hole again.

My first job after dropping out of college was working with Flash and ColdFusion in 2012. Even by that time it was dated, but it was my first real dive into network and server programming so I do look at those days rather fondly.

CFML is one of those things that is simultaneously a brilliant and terrible product. The terrible part is obvious: it's a bloated language that doesn't lend itself terribly well to structure and historically has been very slow (though my understanding is that Lucee actually fixes that somewhat). The "brilliant" parts are less obvious but still cool. For example the cfquery blocks are really neat, and I say that without any sarcasm. Not only does it make it easy to write SQL directly, but there are nice built-in features to avoid injections with cfqueryparam that are easy to use, and you can simply add an attribute to the cfquery to specify caching. That's actually a really cool; I've seen people haphazardly reinvent different SQL caching heuristics and screw them up. The cfquery stuff makes it trivial and it has the advantage of doing it correctly.

Things like that are all over the language (though I haven't used it in awhile so I'd have to dig through notes to find specific examples); pages and pages of ugliness mixed with occasional spots of cleverness.

While I don't want to say I "miss" writing it, because I don't, I do have a bit of gratitude for its existence. If I hadn't picked up ColdFusion because of an, umm, "alternatively licensed" version of Dreamweaver when I was a teenager, my career would likely be very very different.

p0w3n3d

13 days ago

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

telmo

13 days ago

IANAL, etc. but this risk is usually exaggerated by people with a political agenda. EU legislation takes into account the size and purpose of websites. I have never heard of any small website being targeted by such legislation. Do your own due diligence, of course, and take care not to buy into internet hysteria and over-simplification.

pedropaulovc

13 days ago

If you are looking for proactive filtering, you could leverage the Bluesky moderation labeler, I'm not aware of one focused on EU requirements though. If you are looking for reactive filtering, you may create a small labeler just for you where you can flag just the troublesome posts and then you filter them before the comment page is rendered.

madeofpalk

13 days ago

I think regardless of any laws I really wanted want to publish hate speech on my website that has my name on it.

melvinroest

13 days ago

Seems like a fun growth hacking way to grow Bluesky as well. I made an account just to test it out, haha

garganzol

13 days ago

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.

vvpan

13 days ago

I disagree. I think ATProtocol found a pretty good balance for de/centralization. Yes most people are on Bluesky PDSs but the data is easy to backup and move and Mastodon does not improve on that afaik.

jazzyjackson

12 days ago

If BlueSky is the only aggregator that people are subscribing to, what's the point of being able to 'move' your PDS?

vvpan

12 days ago

It is so easy and cheap to run your own aggregator that people run their own. If Bluesky goes down it'd be trivial to use something else.

jazzyjackson

11 days ago

AppView yes, but a Relay is not so trivial, not to mention identity providers.

user

13 days ago

[deleted]

guelo

13 days ago

Mastodon had their shot and people found it too confusing.

elsjaako

13 days ago

I know I shouldn't react this way, but this view that Mastodon can only be successful if it's the largest platform out there always gets under my skin. There are about a million active users of the fediverse, and I know plenty of us find it nice right now.

Active users are measured in different ways by different platforms, so if we compare registered users, fedi has 12.5M compared to 42M for Bluesky. So it's approximately 25% of the size.

It's not the best place to go if you want to get a large following, and it's not Serious Business, but as a user that's not what I want from a social platform. I have plenty of people to follow who are talking about things that interest me.

You're welcome to come have a look if you want, but otherwise no worries. We're doing fine. Maybe you'll check it out sometime when some drama happens at Bluesky. The fediverse is not going away any time soon.

jeffhwang

13 days ago

It's probably user error on my part. But as a somewhat technical user, I've been locked out of Mastodon account for months for no discernible reason. I had my standard first name and last name and I'm on one of the biggest Mastodon servers (mastodon.social).

I suppose I could just create a brand new account or move to another server but it hasn't seemed worth the effort so far

elsjaako

13 days ago

It is a more complex system than having a single central organization. Not every interest is well represented, so there may not be a lot of content for everyone.

I've never had a mastodon.social account, but I can understand the frustration of having technical issues. If you really wanted to join, like you said, you can just try joining on a different server or even software - with other social networks you generally don't get that choice.

But it looks like you gave it a try and made the rational choice that, for you, it's not worth that effort.

But just because it's not your thing, and it's not the biggest one out there, doesn't mean it failed or missed it's shot. Personally I think it's pretty amazing that an open source project, with no VC money or marketing department or big corporate tie in, has about a million active users, and has for a long time now.

soulofmischief

13 days ago

My biggest turnoff has been the fact that you don't own your own data/account and are beholden to whichever dictator(s) run the instance you started out on. You can migrate, but that entire process is just convoluted. I should be able to create an account with my own keys and use them anywhere. Servers can choose to use and share allowlists or blocklists. Each instance being its own little world kills discovery and adds a ton of friction.

And instances seem to be pretty heavy on resources. Reminds me of why Matrix never really took off, running a Matrix server is just too difficult and time-consuming for what you get out of it.

I know proponents of Mastodon will point out that you can work around these warts, but I don't want to. I don't think the model is suited for me.

tolerance

13 days ago

I’m not 100% sure but I think you essentially described how Nostr works in your first paragraph.

soulofmischief

13 days ago

Noster is cool, I've experimented with it but it doesn't solve all of my problems and has some problems of its own, such as spam. Most importantly, it's not really P2P, despite being decentralized.

I have also explored other P2P approaches and built prototype social networks. I prefer a more P2P approach, I think it's more scalable, but it's complicated because IP privacy by default is important in large social networks. I'm still searching for the right solution. I think the advances in LLMs are going to help do a much better job at solving the moderation problem in social networks, and so I am experimenting with that in my off time.

xigoi

12 days ago

Nostr could be great if it wasn’t tightly integrated with cryptocurrency, to the point of using Bitcoin payments as upvotes.

lagniappe

13 days ago

Does Nostr have many users these days?

skybrian

13 days ago

They're not the biggest, but big enough to have a lot of active accounts, so I think they're likely to persist and get more than one shot on goal. (Similarly for Bluesky.)

cyode

13 days ago

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”.

jsheard

13 days ago

> The elevator pitch needs to be one sentence and must not include the word “server”.

Unless you're Discord, who got away with it by redefining "server" to mean something else.

user

13 days ago

[deleted]

arjvik

13 days ago

As far as I remember, they called it a Guild in all their developer documentation

jsheard

13 days ago

Yeah that was the original name they came up with, and it stuck internally. Makes sense as they need to distinguish the "servers" from the actual servers.

krapp

13 days ago

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 more dead than Mastodon.

Nothing is perfect - Mastodon does have its rough edges - but even a moderately successful breakaway from mainstream social media is worth celebrating. I remember when the consensus on HN was that any alternative to the mainstream would be impossible, doomed to fail. The fediverse has its community and its identity, it isn't a flash in the pan.

BeetleB

13 days ago

Same sentiment when it comes to Emacs. As a percentage, its use is generally constant or dropping. A tiny fraction of folks use it.

Yet in absolute numbers users are increasing. And Emacs activity is greater than it has ever been.

Yes. You don't need mass adoption to be wildly successful!

encom

13 days ago

Of course, if you move the goalposts far enough you can say any result is a success. Mastodon looks to have around 800k active users. For comparison IRC has (according to netsplit.de) around 280k users. Is that successful?

krapp

13 days ago

>Mastodon looks to have around 800k active users. For comparison IRC has (according to netsplit.de) around 280k users. Is that successful?

Yes.

Bear in mind many people here would consider geminispace to be a success and I seriously doubt that it even has 100k users.

"Success" has valid definitions beyond market capture and revenue. Mastodon is a success because it hosts a community and because it represents a validation of the model of decentralized federated social media.

And it isn't a zero-sum game, either. The entire point is that there doesn't have to be one "Twitter" one "Facebook" one "Youtube," or even one protocol to rule them all.

BeetleB

13 days ago

Mastodon has more users than HN. It's a success. It's also unlikely to go away. Well, OK, it may go away if BlueSky ever becomes decentralized in practice. If that doesn't happen, the only "threat" to Mastodon is some other federated, decentralized service.

It's been around long enough that it has reached steady state. Existing (active) users are happy with its architecture, and are not concerned with discoverability, etc. Why would they leave?

irishcoffee

13 days ago

It’s hard for something to succeed when the selling point is “we aren’t that other thing!”

Edit to remove unintended flame bait.

tpdly

13 days ago

True, but Bluesky really does solve pains that closed platforms can’t/won’t. Having a choice over your algorithm is like getting lead out of your pipes, or getting a bidet or something.

irishcoffee

13 days ago

I am a bidet convert, they are fantastic.

I never used twitter and I don't use bsky, so I'm not sure how different they are. I just don't think that should be the goal.

user

13 days ago

[deleted]

kmfrk

13 days ago

stream.place[1] operates in a similar way but for stream livechats! We haven't even begun to scratch the surface on how Bluesky comments are going to be used, apparently.

[1]: https://stream.place

tomtomistaken

13 days ago

Great thing! You could automate it further by checking the Bluesky API for a (first) post containing the correct blog post link (from the correct user).

mudkipdev

13 days ago

You could actually do your own moderation top of it, just add a labeler and filter out comments which have a label applied

maelito

13 days ago

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.

vvpan

13 days ago

That is very cool. How do you aggregate the data, listening to public bluesky firehose?

maelito

13 days ago

Yes, with a simple Deno server that writes local JSON.

https://codeberg.org/cartes/serveur/src/branch/master/atprot...

I haven't coded yet the fetching from zero on the server in case my "db" fails.

If it fails for a few hours only, it's easy to listen to the jetstream with a cursor. It it's more, we'd have to rely on exploring the graph : getting all PDS that have a record lexicon, and rebuilding the DB. Not too complicated I believe, but we'll see.

It's what https://quickslice.slices.network is supposed to do but I haven't been invited yet.

hahahahhaah

13 days ago

Like Disqus I guess. Hopefully though with the magic incentive alignment about who is the product in a better place.

That said in Wordpress you spend zero devops time, and get comments and decent spam filtering options. You also don't need users to have a social account.

nicole_express

13 days ago

One thing I'm curious about here is moderation; you are outsourcing it to Bluesky to a degree, but I assume you'd want a way to remove posts you don't want to reproduce on your blog beyond hoping that Bluesky management bans them?

thek3nger

13 days ago

I made something similar on my blog and had the same question. I decided to show in my blog only the comments that I liked. Therefore transforming the “like” action into an “I approve” action.

But I have few comments. Not sure if is a good solution for people with a lot of comments.

Eupolemos

13 days ago

Bsky has something where only your followers can reply, if you choose.

Would make moderation manageable.

bpavuk

13 days ago

one could run a labeler (moderation service) and be in control of content one sees through Bluesky. custom categories, filtering, account and post labeling, etc.

"hateful comment" or "porn" data will stay on the PDS, but it will just not show up in the comments section

BeetleB

13 days ago

I do something similar but with Mastodon.

I haven't implemented moderation, but in principle it's "easy". On a given post, store as an attribute the IDs of messages you don't want to appear (or even its descendants). The JS will have access to the info and can just filter it/them out.

Everything is done client side.

Brajeshwar

13 days ago

This is very, very tempting, but despite not being that popular a blog, mine already went through the SPAM and hatred hell of the late 2000s and early 2010s.

I will not be tempted to have comments on my personal blog.

7777777phil

13 days ago

This is super cool, left a comment, nothing more to say!

tombert

13 days ago

I do something kind of similar using Github Discussions for my comments: https://blog.tombert.com/

I didn't build it myself, I use Giscus, but it seems to work fine. Tough to say, though, since no one comments on my blog :)

dotancohen

13 days ago

I just tried to leave a comment on the kids Logseq page. I'm on mobile, don't have access to my GitHub credentials to log in. I'm also extraordinarily wary of exposing credentials to such a critical service for the benefit of leaving a comment on a blog.

If you have an actual goal of fostering comments, perhaps consider lowering the bar of entry.

tombert

13 days ago

I don't think there's an easy way to add other commenting systems for the Quartz static site generator that I use; their documentation seems to suggest that Giscus is the only way. I don't think Giscus has a way of allowing anonymous comments.

It's not a bad suggestion at all, but I'm not ambitious enough to extend Quartz to support another commenting system, especially since the analytics from Cloudflare Pages indicates that I don't get a lot of traffic anyway.

tombert

10 days ago

I decided that you were right, so I coded BY VIBE a simple comment system using Rust -> WASM -> Cloudflare Workers and Turnstile. No more login required! https://blog.tombert.com/

user

13 days ago

[deleted]

joeyhage

13 days ago

Hey, Micah! So cool seeing you on here. I met you when you interned at Principal several years ago. Hope you are well!

hydroxideOH-

13 days ago

Hey Joey! My Covid-era Principal internship feels like a fever dream now lol but I appreciated the support back then. Hope you're doing well too!

IshKebab

13 days ago

> [Bluesky] can't easily be taken over by an authoritarian billionaire creep

It definitely can. Bluesky is not as decentralised as you think.

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

lukev

13 days ago

A lot's changed since 2024. The decentralization primitives were always in place, but now they're being actively used. Hosting your own PDS is quite viable if you're tech-inclined, or check out Blacksky.

There's also rumors that the W European social network launched a few days ago is built on ATProto.

rsynnott

13 days ago

That's rather outdated at this point; in particular see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacksky . Far from perfect, but it's not as bad as it was.

IshKebab

13 days ago

That Wikipedia article doesn't talk about anything relevant as far as I can see. Can Blacksky users DM Bluesky users? Can they search all of Bluesky's posts? Are there any issues with reply visibility?

ulrischa

13 days ago

But this means I have to make a bluesky posting for every article, right?

hwguy45

13 days ago

It's unfortunate nearly all online social media discourse has bifurcated between left and right. Bluesky is filed with fringe leftists and, frankly, losers. Dorsey created a second social media app, largely the same as twitter, with largely the same echo chamber.

dana321

13 days ago

[flagged]

dang

13 days ago

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

bartread

13 days ago

In 2026? And you host/manage it yourself rather than deferring that to a major platform that wants to monetise your words?

Yeah, well, you kind of are special.

socalgal2

13 days ago

Everyone has different needs. I run tech tutorials so I need:

(*) the entire post, not a excerpt and link to another platform

(*) long posts - posts need to be the size of stack overflow questions

(*) code blocks - it's a tech questions, posters need to be able to post code

(*) screenshots - posters need to be able to post pictures of what's wrong.

(*) serving a static site - I don't want to run a server so a script with an iframe is best. Though it would be nice if they had a message protocol for sizing.

(*) good a blocking/dealing with spam - it should be good at blocking spam. It should be easy to deal with 1000 spam messages should it ever happen. If I have to manually delete them one at a time then no.

(*) free - haha. the stuff I write is open source. I don't want to have to pay on top of my time.

(*) a sustainable business model - not sure what this means except my impression of things like giscus is they either require a server (see above), or they're running the service at a loss so it will probably eventually die.

(*) editable by mod - the posts need to be useful to other users and often posters mis-format

I don't use anything related to github because I expect github will eventually disallow this. I would consider using github if github itself offered the service. Github has one of the best UIs for tech question IMO. Markdown, drag and drop images, drag and drop video, large message size.

I use disqus because even though it sucks, it mostly checks all of those boxes. It's worst part is code blocks. It supports them but they are hard to use.

I looked into things like giscus and utterance. They both require a server or you trusting that they'll run theirs forever. They also use that ludicris "Act on your behalf" BS github permissions system.

publicdebates

13 days ago

> 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.

galleywest200

13 days ago

Doesn’t Twitter make you pay an exorbitant fee for accessing their API? At least BlueSky is free to access anything on the AT Protocol.

jsheard

13 days ago

Yep, the free tier only gives you 100 reads per month, and the cheapest paid tier is $200 per month.

mcintyre1994

13 days ago

If we grant your premise, isn’t bluesky the only one of them where you can access the data freely?

publicdebates

13 days ago

For now. Twitter used to have a free API also.

Vaslo

13 days ago

Blue sky isn’t even close to X

lukev

13 days ago

Firstly, the idea that "1/3" of people went to truthsocial is laughable.

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.