FRESH

Hacker News

Home

I added a Bluesky comment section to my blog

296 points by hydroxideOH-

by susam

4 subcomments

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.

by ascorbic

0 subcomment

If you want a non-React solution, I made a Bluesky comments web component https://github.com/ascorbic/bluesky-comments-tag
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/

by jesse_dot_id

1 subcomments

I like your idea and stole it but used Mastodon instead :)
https://jesse.id/blog/posts/you-can-now-comment-on-my-blog-f...

by f311a

3 subcomments

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.

by p0w3n3d

3 subcomments

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

by melvinroest

3 subcomments

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

by tomtomistaken

0 subcomment

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).

by mudkipdev

0 subcomment

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

by maelito

1 subcomments

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.

by Brajeshwar

0 subcomment

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.

by nicole_express

4 subcomments

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?

by 7777777phil

0 subcomment

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

by jasoneckert

0 subcomment

This is great!
I did something similar, but with GitHub Discussions because my blog is hosted on GitHub Pages and composited with Hugo, and I wanted all components to run as close as possible to one another: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/github-discussions-blog...

by tombert

1 subcomments

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 :)

0 subcomment

by pmb

0 subcomment

It's nice, right? I did it a while ago and I highly recommend it. https://triplepat.com/blog/2024/10/17/how-the-website-works

by tomtomistaken

2 subcomments

I am working on https://libmap.org where you can add posts to a map via Bluesky and mastodon.social.

by joeyhage

1 subcomments

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

by ulrischa

0 subcomment

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

by jesse_dot_id

0 subcomment

Cool use of a social network.

by hwguy45

0 subcomment

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.

by hahahahhaah

0 subcomment

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.

by IshKebab

2 subcomments

> [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/

by bk496

0 subcomment

Cool!

by francis222

0 subcomment

[dead]

by bubbi

0 subcomment

[dead]

by BillLumbergh

1 subcomments

Bluesky isn't anything special though and will disappear soon enough.

by lingrush4

0 subcomment

[flagged]

by dana321

2 subcomments

[flagged]

by socalgal2

0 subcomment

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.

by publicdebates

4 subcomments

> 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.