Interesting article! I always enjoy reading how people build and maintain their independent personal websites. This post starts with the "Comment System Problem" and mentions four possible solutions, but I think there's a fifth that has worked well for me.
After spending too much time fiddling with third-party comment systems, I ended up building my own [1]. It's pretty barebones, just does what I need, and nothing more.
Each comment is written to a text file for manual review, so I don't have to worry about spam, cross-site scripting, or irrelevant comments. I usually check them on weekends and add them to my blog.
Comments are stored as plain HTML files, and my static site generator [2] builds the site along with the comment pages [3]. So in a way, it's also a static comment pages generator.
This setup doesn't meet the five attributes (no infra, rich content, real identity, etc.) in the second section of the article, so it wouldn't suit the author's needs, but it has worked quite well for me. I've been using it for at least four years (perhaps much longer, since my old PHP website did something similar), and I've been quite happy with it.
I like your solution - I think it is perfectly fine for a low traffic blog.
Personally I find comments not worth the bother and purposely did not include them on my site. My blog is an expression of my personality and the idea of other peoples words appearing on my pages seems weird to me.
I know people enjoy feedback, which is why I have taken to emailing bloggers whose work I enjoy instead of leaving meaningless comments.
I feel the same. Comment sections can be a nice place for further discussion, but so often I find that they derail the bloggers original thought and it's like another article within the article. When you're blogging something informational it might make sense, but personal stuff I'd rather just keep it as my own thought and let others interact further in private if they want.
It can be good as a small community of practice around a resource. It lets people share feedback and ask questions that benefit other readers. This is why I consider reinstating them on my websites.
Note Bluesky is architected to be downstream of PDS (personal data servers) which any user can switch to another provider, and the Bluesky app server acts as an aggregator (but anyone else can build their own aggregators — and people already have). So as Natalie notes in the post, you don’t even “have to” use the Bluesky app API to access the posts. You can get them from a third-party app server (“app view”) or even have your own. They’re all aggregating from the same data source.
Some of this is already outdated. With the switch to non-indexing relays (“Sync 1.1”), people are already running independent relays quite cheaply. There are also actual independent AppViews coming up.
> I'm not optimistic about BlueSky's profitability - the current free-at-point of use is a result of VC funding.
You aren't wrong, there will be a turn at some point just like there was with Twitter, but then the same is true of 'AI' and people seem happy to go all-in on that. If VC's want to burn their money on the dream of becoming some new kind of rich... good, let them. Sure it turns sour after a while (Uber, Doordash, etc)... but enjoy the largess before they figure out there's no magic money tree in those hills.
and would say the bright side of the "enshittification cycle" is that we get nice places for a while and then we can move on. It's not like people party at the Mudd Club or CBGB anymore and why should they? Theory at
If we already know that the for-profit social networks will always go through the enshittification cycle, why not use a not-for-profit social network like mastodon?
To each their own. I prefer the centralized-yet-open approach of bluesky to the artistic chaos of mastodon. I like the idea of mastodon, and it's great for certain kind of people and certain kind of discussion, but I hope you agree that it will never be mass adopted.
It's possible that it will become mass adopted in the future on account of its (effective) uncensorability. The gulf between Bluesky and Mastodon UX is, in my opinion, relatively small and fixable with a bit of effort.
The Bluesky ecosystem is so cool. I read this approach presented here some times ago. The only thing that could be problematic: you need to make a posting on Bluesky for all your Web pages to use the commenting system. And a webcomponent for this would be nice
Bluesky is very useful to store information on users' existing accounts.
I'm currently building a review system for my open source Web map https://cartes.app, based on Bluesky. Not trivial though, you have to create a lexicon and maintain a DB based on the Bluesky stream.
You can go pretty far without your own DB. Depends on the types of queries you need to make. For my project[1], I was able to use getRecord[2] for a lot of the data that needed fetching on the client-side.
Except that it got around 2.9K reviews by now, which is more then you have right now. Furthermore, we shouldn't further fragment the few open source review efforts we have.
Many OSM apps will also be reluctant to adopt a closed source solution that might be closed of any moment. And under what licenses will those reviews be? As MapComplete developer, I can not and will not be adopting a system based on Bluesky
The idea of fragmentation depends on a model of decentralization that still makes the platform inseparable from the data it works with. AT separates concerns so that the priorities of your data host and the priorities of your platform host can conflict without one being able to control the other even if you don't self-host. All the reviews are just an entry in your PDS, so it's all there for any new or existing platform.
Thousands of people have already set up their own PDSes and it's inevitable managed hosts will appear soon. Blacksky just started migrating people over to its own PDS. AT's credible exit is close to reality after about two years while all the promise of ActivityPub and predecessor protocols has yet to materialize after over 15 years.
I have seen the best of the best Internet Services go away, some unintentionally. These days, my first question is, “Can I Walk Out?” without worrying about the content or take the content with me and go elsewhere.
Or just post a link to your blog article here and link to it at the end of your blog article with the label Comments. You filter for those with HN accounts instead of Bluesky accounts. As for rich content, words are enough IMHO.
>You filter for those with HN accounts instead of Bluesky accounts
More people have HN accounts than bluesky accounts. Bluesky is pretending to be a public forum, while HN is purely proprietary and closed solution - I'd much prefer to depend on bluesky than on HN (despite already having an account). Also there are limits to acceptable self-promotion here.
>As for rich content, words are enough IMHO.
As you correctly noted, this is your opinion, that the author of TFA doesn't share.
I hesitate to give one corporation or entity too much credit, but at least for the moment, the community on Blueksy is pretty fun. Admittedly, I was a fan of the Twitter of old, and that seems to be the crowd that is most active on Bluesky now. We'll see where it goes.
Unless of course you say something that pisses off the BS mod cabal, or you are deliberately mass-reported by some clique of users, then your account will be immediately banned. Or even worse, your account made it onto some pre-shared blacklist so you'll be invisible before you say a word.
BS is an attempt to recreate an even more toxic environment than old Twitter ever was.
> Or even worse, your account made it onto some pre-shared blacklist so you'll be invisible before you say a word.
The various blocklists are opt-in; you’ll only be invisible to their respective subscribers. Only the default bluesky moderation list is global, and they only adjudicate ToS violations (like every other social network).
Community moderation is quite distributed and egalitarian on bsky, perhaps even more so than the benevolent dictatorship used here (which obviously doesn’t scale).
> BS is an attempt to recreate an even more toxic environment than old Twitter ever was.
On Bsky I have yet to have anyone out of the blue, with no prior interaction, call me a slur or racial epithet. Can’t say the same about my old Twitter account.
> Only the default bluesky moderation list is global
And of course it's also opt in as well. Just the default bluesky client does that by default. Any third party client (ex: https://deer.social or https://zeppelin.social) can opt-out of "default moderation". And technically you could use a userscript or even potentially a ublock rule/filter to disable default moderation (just like you can to disable regional moderation or age verification).
I was considering creating a censorship free bluesky pds. The showstopper is that bluesky can cut off read access to the content firehose relay. I suspect they would do that, or be forced to do that if a true free speech platform were to emerge.
Sorry, I should clarify. The system is designed to have moderation be opt in. It isn't opt-in or opt-out on the default client. On the default client it is mandatory.
The reason I said it's opt-in is because moderation is added client-side by including the moderation service's DID in the `atproto-accept-labelers` HTTP header when sending requests to the appview.
So it is by-design opt-in, just in practice the "first party bluesky client" makes the choice for you for legal compliance reasons, and with an increasing hint-hint-nudge-nudge from the devs to use third party or forked clients to bypass the various legal restrictions countries keep trying to impose on them.
it has guest support (so people does not need a matrix account to comment), but if you use your own matrix account, you are essentially joining a matrix room per post.
This is interesting to me for the reason of having a way to interact with social media that isn't loading a social media feed. It would be great to put this on my blog and then have people able to comment on it, and basically the only way I interact with Blue Sky or any social media feed is through this kind of interface and through creating content.
Over the years I've found that any interaction with social media that involves me loading the feed inevitably ends up with me doomscrolling or spending way too much time scrolling stuff that doesn't add anything to my life. This could be a way to avoid that cycle, finally, but still interact with the wider social media world a little bit.
> Over the years I've found that any interaction with social media that involves me loading the feed inevitably ends up with me doomscrolling or spending way too much time scrolling stuff that doesn't add anything to my life.
If interested in understanding this topic in detail, https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net has information on running your own relay network, migrating data, etc as it relates to Bluesky and AT Proto. Work continues to enable data migration, portability, alternate relay networks, etc. https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t is particularly relevant.
(blog author works at bluesky, no affiliation personally)
So. You can back up your personal data to what is effectively a fancy tar ball (technically it's a collection of CAR files akin to what IPFS uses) and you can restore that to any PDS (personal data server) when you point your account there (either via your did:plc doc or via DNS records via did:web). So even if your current PDS implodes or bans you, you can just go somewhere else.
And of course there are several implementations and hosts for relays (the gossip nodes), PDS implementations, clients, and appviews (the server backend for bluesky the web app).
So strictly speaking if bluesky imploded tomorrow you could just use a self hosted version of the same app or use someone else's (such as https://zeppelin.social).
The PLC directory is still technically in bluesky's hands but is being transferred an independent foundation atm and could be trivially forked if needed. And of course if you use did:web that doesn't apply to you and you just depend on DNS.
But that's just your own posts isn't it? Wouldn't the replies from others, which would end up as comments on this author's blog, be in other users' CAR archives in each of their PDSes?
This is true. In the simple implementation, your blog would probably lose most comments if BlueSky went down and most users don't migrate to a new PDS.
However, atproto data is append-only and cache-friendly. It wouldn't be hard to record historical comments and join them to the ones returned by the live query. (I'm probably just going to script periodic backups for mine and worry about displaying them when/if BlueSky does dissappear.)
But then the only reason to use BlueSky is that your network is using it.
It’s a completely valid reason, but All the talk about platform lock in, independent nodes and relay and whatnot is just to make you feel better (I listened to some talks and podcasts but realized that it’s all just window dressing, you can be practically deplatformed at any time, so I’m hazy on the details).
At a minimum, the atproto provides an easy auth solution and public API for your app's data. Running a relay for your lexicon is basically the same as running a normal app server with those built in.
Credible exit matters too. The idea that all of this data is signed, public, and verifiable by anyone helps ensure that the provider is accountable to the community. A provider might decide against enshittifying a product if they're worried about a competitor doing better and taking their place.
Yes, an atproto lexicon will tend to be dominated by a small number of nodes. It's not the perfect distributed system some would prefer, but it is a real improvement on the completely centralized models seen everywhere today.
yep that'll be in their PDS. but that's the nature of the beast. you as the user control your data and your posts.
So if there's a large scale exodus from bluesky, as long as full backfills of the network exist, you'll be able to reconstruct your CAR files, etc even if your PDS dies.
So yes if they die all the comments disappear but people can reconstruct their history and move it to other PDS like blacksky, northsky, or others who are getting ready to start onboarding/open enrollment.
TLDR it'd be a bit rough if they died overnight but if it was a slow death and people had a bit of warning you'd see people move on to other PDS without issue.
Beyond this, BlueSky definitely kicks a lot of Libertarian and Right-leaning users off the platform. It seems to be okay if you're left of center or politically agnostic.
The problem with the mentality is that conservative ideas aren't ever censored, even on mainstream platforms like Instagram.
Rather, there is an association between modern conservative/libertarian voices and populist messaging - and all the pitfalls that come with it. Meaning, vulgarity, emotional bait, deception, and purposefully offensive language.
Like, the modern American conservative leadership cannot advertise their own ideology without resorting to lies and attacks of character. The left, by comparison, does not operate that way.
So, if you're censoring shitheads who are generally unliked, that might appear as though youre targeting conservatives or right leaning people. But you're not.
Basically, the right has purposefully positioned themselves to be associated with unpalatable ideas in order to leverage populist messaging. And this worked - they won an election. The downside is that now if you filter out unpalatable ideas such as blatant slurs you're going to necessarily mostly target right wing people. By accident.
This is a claim that's going to require support. Bluesky's moderation service (just adds metadata/labels to posts/accounts) is all client side opt-in. It's force-enabled by the default client but any third party client allows you to opt-out (or doesn't even use it by default).
And PDS level/"account" bans are just at the PDS. If you've been "banned", that's just bluesky the PDS host telling you they don't want to host you and that you need to go host your data yourself or find someone else to host it for you. i.e. find another PDS.
Basically every form of ban or moderation in atproto/bluesky is "soft" moderation and you can fairly trivially bypass it and continue doing your own thing.
The overwhelming majority of right wing accounts that get banned do so soon after joining (and generally after going to pick fights). And they never even bother to try to keep their accounts, instead choosing to create new accounts to get banned again or abandon the platform. It's disingenuous behavior and for right wing personalities it feels almost more like a sticker of pride that they were "banned from bluesky".
Plenty of right leaning and libertarian accounts exist on bluesky. Project Liberal [1] and Liberal Party USA [2] (run by Josh Eakle[3] and Kevin Gaughen[4] respectively) exist just fine on bluesky and they are large splinter groups from the Libertarian Party following the whole Mises Caucus coup attempt thing. Likewise a number of libertarian groups such as the Libertarian Party of Lousiana [5] do just fine on bluesky. And of course AI and Cryptocurrency people also do just fine on bluesky as well despite the stereotypes against them and the common belief that "they aren't welcome on bluesky". The worst thing that happens is people block or mute you and you don't have to deal with them anymore rather than toxicly fighting each other each time you see each other.
TLDR: Everyone is welcome on bluesky but there's no requirement for people to tolerate you. Even if you violate every transgression, as long as you aren't posting literal child porn to the network you'll still be able to exist just fine however people might just ignore you.
And how many people even know there are other PDS's? You install the official bsky app, you create an account and the account gets deleted, how are you supposed to know? There's no message, warning, alert, etc.
The vast majority of people using Bluesky don't use a 3rd party or self-hosted PDS because they aren't and probably shouldn't have to be aware of it. It isn't even a prominent feature. At least with Mastodon, it's a big part of the culture at its' core... you don't see this with the official app even.
I didn't even know that was even an option until you mentioned it. I only know that there have been banned accounts on the official/default one that didn't even post anything yet.
The entire design of the architecture is for it to be driven primarily by the third party developers and the community. Bluesky the company does the bare minimum for legal compliance and every time there's an issue with legal compliance/moderation, the "first party" developers make threads to teach people how to use third party apps, etc to bypass the systems they are forced to implement.
The goal is that third party apps take over as the majority share of clients over time and the main impl should be seen as a "reference implementation".
And that of course ignores all the other non-bluesky projects currently incubating on atproto.
> And of course AI and Cryptocurrency people also do just fine on bluesky as well despite the stereotypes against them and the common belief that "they aren't welcome on bluesky".
"do just fine" is really pushing it I think. I don't think the core mod team or the default-client's moderation service is biased toward the right or the left (at least in how they apply moderation, not necessarily their personal beliefs.) I think the core team is doing the best job they can given their resourcing. The community on the site is a different story.
There was an attempt by AI researchers to join the site and they all got bullied until they left, largely by the community. Pretty much every reply to an NYT article that doesn't denigrate Trump is either "wow how does the NYT have the time to write about fashion/lifestyle/<anything but how Trump is awful>, it's because they've an evil right wing publication" or "how dare the NYT platform this opinion it's an evil right wing opinion". If you look at feature rollouts or social posts by the team you get lots of well-liked comments about how the mod team enables right wing behavior.
I use the platform a lot and am really rooting for them to succeed, but I feel that there's just a lot of lefty toxicity on the platform and that the community on there loves politics and often brings politics into unrelated threads. They seem interested in a sort of pop politics too, not the kind of harder political analysis that a good think tank or non-fiction book can provide either. I feel that if you're into lots of pop left politics and the culture that emerges from a community with this love then you'll like Bluesky. For now I think the community is too political to really foster wider conversations the way pre-Elon Twitter did.
I’ve read all of those profiles and they all seem to lean progressive. If your argument is that there’s a diversity of thought, that proof is not enough.
I'm specifically targeting the libertarian side of the original comment as I don't keep up with authoritarian conservatives and I generally don't want to engage with them (nor do I the authoritarian left).
LPLouisiana is definitely left leaning libertarian but the first 4 are all very much your old school small government libertarians.
Both Josh Eakle and Kevin Gaughen used to be senior members of the Libertarian Party prior to the Mises Caucus burning it to the ground and they are absolutely center right libertarians through and through.
Bluesky moderation has been fairly even handed as far as I have seen. They also ban plenty of leftists and trans activists when these happen to exceed the ToS. And good luck if you’re a Palestinian trying to fundraise on the platform; they get banned by the hundreds.
Please don't break the site guidelines like this, no matter how incorrect another comment is or you feel it is.
Doing this has the obvious downside of making the threads more toxic, plus the less obvious one of discrediting the truth (assuming your comment is indeed correct) by giving it toxic associations. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
That's better, thanks, and I don't mean to pile on! but why include "Clearly you don't use it"?
One can't conclude that for sure, it's unnecessarily personal, and it doesn't add anything (other than a swipe) to the correct information in your post.
Is it perhaps that the "right-leaning" social media users being banned are also violating the rules? Attacks and abuse seem to be standard practice, especially for the American right.
What rules are we talking about? Because my Bluesky feed (the Discover section) is filled with name-calling, hints at political violence, etc. all coming from liberal/left accounts.
Spam isn't the only challenge of going self-hosted and it's cool to tie into an existing ecosystem for identity. Also it's pretty neat that people can engage outside of your website while you still get to pick what gets surfaced on your own website.
I have a static site. Self hosted would mean I’d need a database and I think right now I want to keep the static generation. Happy to try self hosted in future and write my own solution but right now I got plenty of side projects
Most Mastodon instances already have moderation. Can that be leveraged? Or does it tend to be too permissive?
If I only show comments from a well-moderated Mastodon instance that my main account is on, plus any instances that it federates with, does that not solve the problem?
Bluesky allows thread owners to hide posts from the thread.
Presumably the blog interface itself can choose to simply not surface hidden replies at all; if you view the thread via a different client (eg the Bluesky app) you would have the option of seeing the hidden posts.
And of course if you view the thread through your own Bluesky interface your personal blocklists and moderation would apply to the thread.
I'm not sure if this implements it, but Bluesky has an API to hide replies (called thread gating). It's a separate API call though, so you don't get it automatically when loading a thread via the API.
You can only hide them. Bluesky also can’t block users, only hide them from your timelines (if you’re using an app that respects that). It’s quite limited compared to Mastodon in that regard.
I wish Bluesky would reveal their full idea on how they’re going to monetise. All this chatter how they’re different because they have this super complicated architecture always comes short of revealing what happens when they start charging for things.
Id love a term for this sort of thing. It's like tech hijacking or something. Google sheets as a backend, github discussions for a comment system, etc.
Lately I've got the goal of stuffing anything that can possibly be stuffed with photos stuffed with photos -- that and dislodging the sneaker brand that stole my 3-character handle I was using in LoL long ago from the SERPs.
Back in 2011 my gut reaction was to treat the embedding of Discus comments and 'roll yourself a quickie comment section' as the end of something good and the beginning of something bad. Completely invisible to your average user, both the potential for 'central lockdown'and cross site tracking that was 'invisible'. Outsourcing a common webmaster maintenance task in a way that affected other people in ways they didn't realize. At first. We Men Who Yell At Clouds remember the before times. Discus was the first commonly used script embed, even when people were copying and downloading,installing,serving their own libraries instead of linking to creepy sites.
Security's better now in general. But the same hands-on approach sometimes brought us widely exploited 0-days. Drupal was obnoxious. Yet people knew throbbing banner ads were cross-site things in a way you could turn off.
You normally don't notice tbh. Switching PDS is entirely invisible to the frontend. There's a lot of self hosted PDS users (since it's basically a small go router + sqlite) but there's also bigger community PDS projects being spun up including blacksky and northsky.
As for frontends, there's a bunch of them and a lot of them focus on changing the UX. But for self hosted "bluesky", there is https://deer.social which is a forked client that still relies on the bluesky appview/backend and there is https://zeppelin.social which is downstream of deer social but also runs their own appview independent of "big bluesky".
If you go to that URL, you'll see the landing page for the atproto PDS software.
Edit: Ah, and seems Kuba is hosting a directory of profiles using their own PDS as well, lots of examples over there: https://blue.mackuba.eu/directory/pdses
Biggest one right now (excluding the default one) seems to be atproto.brid.gy, which has 40393 accounts.
Not only is the bluesky network highly centralized right now, its UI is designed to perpetually lock users into the main bluesky server. Even if you use your own identity, when sharing the URLs to the posts via the UI, the URL defaults to bsky dot app domain, which will break if the author ever moves to a second server.
2. If you change your handle (for did:plc, did:web can't do this because DNS) it used to break links but nowadays this isn't a problem because handle resolution respects historical handle naming (I think it works by post+handle age but I can't remember).
3. Also if you share posts using the did syntax instead of handle syntax (which bluesky seems to be slowly changing over to, at least profiles do this now), it's stable regardless of handle changes.
4. If you want to switch frontends, you can use an extension or app like at://wormhole to do so. UX for this should improve over time but that's a big "eventually".
5. Hopefully the at:// URI format catches on but that's a long ways away given that browsers make using custom URIs an absolute nightmare.
It’s odd to eliminate using GitHub issues as comments because the user would need a GitHub account then decide on bluesky. Bluesky would also require users to have a Bluesky account? How many readers already have a GitHub account vs already have a Bluesky account?
I mean it’s fine, use whatever your comfortable with and Bluesky is the next frontier for development ideas.
As of this comment, Bluesky has ~38M users. To sign up is trivial, and doesn't constrain you to folks who already have a Github account or would sign up for one (tech weighted). Skate to where the puck is going. I suppose including a link to the Bluesky sign up page near the discussion section of a post would be helpful, for those not yet onboarded who want to immediately discuss or intend to in the future.
EDIT: Ask five people you know outside of tech if they have a Github account. Everyone I know outside of tech moved to Bluesky from Twitter. No one I know outside of tech has a Github account. If I encounter someone who has neither, I'm of course going to recommend a Bluesky account from a utility perspective, as they're likely never going to contribute code, issues, discussion on GH if not a tech person.
(most of my network is non tech, non startup, non SV people, ymmv; HN is the closest I get to tech folks most of the time)
Ehhh the metric for active users is a bit weird. The metric is "daily active likers" but I know a lot of people lurk and don't like posts often. I personally rarely like posts unless I think to go out of my way to do so but I browse the site daily.
And even then while "daily active likers" is down half from 6 months ago, it's still up substantially from even just a month or two prior to that. Bluesky exploded in size at the start of the year and it seems to be finally settling into a steady state with gradual growth (vs the prior explosive growth + falloff).
"Daily records" (at the bottom of the page) is a bit better metric of overall network activity and even though it has also fallen since peak it shows there's still an order of magnitude more activity on network than prior to blowing up.
The puck is not going to bluesky. Ads are back on X. Many who claim to have left have returned. Bluesky is the far leftist version of gab, no matter how you don’t like people saying that.
I’m among that 31M who signed up (as are many of my friends) and only the most left ones are still using it. I trolled for a couple of days until it got boring.
Bluesky is already dying and has 38M registered users to Githubs 225M users. Github is growing, and Bluesky isn't. By your own suggestion, they should have used Github.
You can host your own Bluesky instance and federate across instances, with all the data you host stored in an open an portable format, can you do the same with GitHub?
One of the many reasons I can't get a security clearance was that I received an invitation on red paper to go to a Christmas party put on by this organization
so I did and got photographed with weird Soviet cameras and shook hands with Gus Hall who was dressed up as Santa Claus and saying "Ho Ho Ho!"
(My wife and I were so antinomian that our hippie outfits got us described as "the strangest people in NYC" in front of the Fox News headquarters, which wasn't hard to do in the conformist 1990s, then we took the bus to Manchester, NH, arrived at 4am and figured there was no reason not to walk out to the suburbs and shocked my mom when we knocked on the door around 7am)
Interesting article! I always enjoy reading how people build and maintain their independent personal websites. This post starts with the "Comment System Problem" and mentions four possible solutions, but I think there's a fifth that has worked well for me.
After spending too much time fiddling with third-party comment systems, I ended up building my own [1]. It's pretty barebones, just does what I need, and nothing more.
Each comment is written to a text file for manual review, so I don't have to worry about spam, cross-site scripting, or irrelevant comments. I usually check them on weekends and add them to my blog.
Comments are stored as plain HTML files, and my static site generator [2] builds the site along with the comment pages [3]. So in a way, it's also a static comment pages generator.
This setup doesn't meet the five attributes (no infra, rich content, real identity, etc.) in the second section of the article, so it wouldn't suit the author's needs, but it has worked quite well for me. I've been using it for at least four years (perhaps much longer, since my old PHP website did something similar), and I've been quite happy with it.
[1] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/form.lisp
[2] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/site.lisp
[3] https://susam.net/comments/
Taking comments via a (n email) form, which you then manually add under the article's html/markdown is nice.
That's what I do, except I skip the form and just provide my email address at the bottom of each post.
I like your solution - I think it is perfectly fine for a low traffic blog.
Personally I find comments not worth the bother and purposely did not include them on my site. My blog is an expression of my personality and the idea of other peoples words appearing on my pages seems weird to me.
I know people enjoy feedback, which is why I have taken to emailing bloggers whose work I enjoy instead of leaving meaningless comments.
I feel the same. Comment sections can be a nice place for further discussion, but so often I find that they derail the bloggers original thought and it's like another article within the article. When you're blogging something informational it might make sense, but personal stuff I'd rather just keep it as my own thought and let others interact further in private if they want.
It can be good as a small community of practice around a resource. It lets people share feedback and ask questions that benefit other readers. This is why I consider reinstating them on my websites.
kind of like "letters to the editor" in newspapers (:
I'm not optimistic about BlueSky's profitability - the current free-at-point of use is a result of VC funding.
So personally I'd be wary of adopting it. I think it's likely the API gets locked down and the comments break in a couple of years.
Note Bluesky is architected to be downstream of PDS (personal data servers) which any user can switch to another provider, and the Bluesky app server acts as an aggregator (but anyone else can build their own aggregators — and people already have). So as Natalie notes in the post, you don’t even “have to” use the Bluesky app API to access the posts. You can get them from a third-party app server (“app view”) or even have your own. They’re all aggregating from the same data source.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yoursel...
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
Some of this is already outdated. With the switch to non-indexing relays (“Sync 1.1”), people are already running independent relays quite cheaply. There are also actual independent AppViews coming up.
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l
I'll believe it when I see a list of relatively large, independent servers, which don't go offline all together in case of network problems.
> I'm not optimistic about BlueSky's profitability - the current free-at-point of use is a result of VC funding.
You aren't wrong, there will be a turn at some point just like there was with Twitter, but then the same is true of 'AI' and people seem happy to go all-in on that. If VC's want to burn their money on the dream of becoming some new kind of rich... good, let them. Sure it turns sour after a while (Uber, Doordash, etc)... but enjoy the largess before they figure out there's no magic money tree in those hills.
> but enjoy the largess before they figure out there's no magic money tree
...and you loose access to all your messages and network.
Incorrect: https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/adversarial-pds-migrat...
I really believe in
https://indieweb.org/POSSE
and would say the bright side of the "enshittification cycle" is that we get nice places for a while and then we can move on. It's not like people party at the Mudd Club or CBGB anymore and why should they? Theory at
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114988462585487831
If we already know that the for-profit social networks will always go through the enshittification cycle, why not use a not-for-profit social network like mastodon?
You should use both of them and have tools to automate that.
I think BlueSky should lean into this and operate as a domain registrar like Squarespace does.
They did this for a few years (specifically selling domains to use as a username), not sure if they do anymore.
They also sold a bunch of shirts as a stunt against Meta earlier this year, and the shirt sales were more revenue than the domains had been.
Bluesky is just enshittified Mastodon. It advertises federation while making it extremely impractical to use
To each their own. I prefer the centralized-yet-open approach of bluesky to the artistic chaos of mastodon. I like the idea of mastodon, and it's great for certain kind of people and certain kind of discussion, but I hope you agree that it will never be mass adopted.
It's possible that it will become mass adopted in the future on account of its (effective) uncensorability. The gulf between Bluesky and Mastodon UX is, in my opinion, relatively small and fixable with a bit of effort.
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The Bluesky ecosystem is so cool. I read this approach presented here some times ago. The only thing that could be problematic: you need to make a posting on Bluesky for all your Web pages to use the commenting system. And a webcomponent for this would be nice
Bluesky is very useful to store information on users' existing accounts.
I'm currently building a review system for my open source Web map https://cartes.app, based on Bluesky. Not trivial though, you have to create a lexicon and maintain a DB based on the Bluesky stream.
You can go pretty far without your own DB. Depends on the types of queries you need to make. For my project[1], I was able to use getRecord[2] for a lot of the data that needed fetching on the client-side.
1 - https://scrapboard.org/
2 - https://docs.bsky.app/docs/api/com-atproto-repo-get-record
Could you say more about what you're building? I didn't quite understand from your comment or the website.
Wait, what? Please don't do that, use mangrove.reviews instead please. They use clear CC-BY-SA licenses; MapComplete.org uses it
Bluesky _will_ enshittify sooner or later
Mangrove has almost nothing in its DB, no news for years, and a broken website.
Better go with my own DB.
Or use a network with a well-designed protocol, a hosted service, 30 million users, a social graph, moderation...
Except that it got around 2.9K reviews by now, which is more then you have right now. Furthermore, we shouldn't further fragment the few open source review efforts we have.
Many OSM apps will also be reluctant to adopt a closed source solution that might be closed of any moment. And under what licenses will those reviews be? As MapComplete developer, I can not and will not be adopting a system based on Bluesky
The idea of fragmentation depends on a model of decentralization that still makes the platform inseparable from the data it works with. AT separates concerns so that the priorities of your data host and the priorities of your platform host can conflict without one being able to control the other even if you don't self-host. All the reviews are just an entry in your PDS, so it's all there for any new or existing platform.
Thousands of people have already set up their own PDSes and it's inevitable managed hosts will appear soon. Blacksky just started migrating people over to its own PDS. AT's credible exit is close to reality after about two years while all the promise of ActivityPub and predecessor protocols has yet to materialize after over 15 years.
> Many OSM apps will also be reluctant to adopt a closed source solution that might be closed of any moment.
Bluesky is not closed-source, it's mostly open. It's a hard mastodon-circle myth. Aside from being open-source, it's a protocol.
What I'm doing with Bluesky should be easy to reproduce with Mastodon, opening to 10 M accounts more.
People won't create an account to review. Not even a OSM account. We need to build on what's available, and ATProto is spot-on for this usage.
Also, to my knowledge, Mangroves does not provide photo upload. Panoramax is the way to for outdoor pictures, but not for inside.
I have seen the best of the best Internet Services go away, some unintentionally. These days, my first question is, “Can I Walk Out?” without worrying about the content or take the content with me and go elsewhere.
https://brajeshwar.com/2025/can-i-walk-out/
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/
>I’ve been running my blog without decent comments for years.
I only see 2 posts on the entire blog, both from 2025 (and one is this post).
They had another blog as per archive.org
Or just post a link to your blog article here and link to it at the end of your blog article with the label Comments. You filter for those with HN accounts instead of Bluesky accounts. As for rich content, words are enough IMHO.
>You filter for those with HN accounts instead of Bluesky accounts
More people have HN accounts than bluesky accounts. Bluesky is pretending to be a public forum, while HN is purely proprietary and closed solution - I'd much prefer to depend on bluesky than on HN (despite already having an account). Also there are limits to acceptable self-promotion here.
>As for rich content, words are enough IMHO.
As you correctly noted, this is your opinion, that the author of TFA doesn't share.
> More people have HN accounts than bluesky accounts
You really think that?
Feels like Bluesky is single-handedly making the Internet an open for new ideas again
I hesitate to give one corporation or entity too much credit, but at least for the moment, the community on Blueksy is pretty fun. Admittedly, I was a fan of the Twitter of old, and that seems to be the crowd that is most active on Bluesky now. We'll see where it goes.
"Protocols, not platforms." As the kids say, "build mode" but building what can't be captured, enshittified, etc.
Well no, it’s basically a Threads with slightly more open integration options. You probably mean ATProto, perhaps.
Unless of course you say something that pisses off the BS mod cabal, or you are deliberately mass-reported by some clique of users, then your account will be immediately banned. Or even worse, your account made it onto some pre-shared blacklist so you'll be invisible before you say a word.
BS is an attempt to recreate an even more toxic environment than old Twitter ever was.
Which is all very high school cafeteria-drama.
> Or even worse, your account made it onto some pre-shared blacklist so you'll be invisible before you say a word.
Seems to me like people who subscribe to a blocklist that I'm on aren't people I want to be visible to/communicate with.
> Or even worse, your account made it onto some pre-shared blacklist so you'll be invisible before you say a word.
The various blocklists are opt-in; you’ll only be invisible to their respective subscribers. Only the default bluesky moderation list is global, and they only adjudicate ToS violations (like every other social network).
Community moderation is quite distributed and egalitarian on bsky, perhaps even more so than the benevolent dictatorship used here (which obviously doesn’t scale).
> BS is an attempt to recreate an even more toxic environment than old Twitter ever was.
On Bsky I have yet to have anyone out of the blue, with no prior interaction, call me a slur or racial epithet. Can’t say the same about my old Twitter account.
> Only the default bluesky moderation list is global
And of course it's also opt in as well. Just the default bluesky client does that by default. Any third party client (ex: https://deer.social or https://zeppelin.social) can opt-out of "default moderation". And technically you could use a userscript or even potentially a ublock rule/filter to disable default moderation (just like you can to disable regional moderation or age verification).
I was considering creating a censorship free bluesky pds. The showstopper is that bluesky can cut off read access to the content firehose relay. I suspect they would do that, or be forced to do that if a true free speech platform were to emerge.
> And of course it's also opt in as well. Just the default bluesky client does that by default.
This means it's opt-out. Not opt-in.
Sorry, I should clarify. The system is designed to have moderation be opt in. It isn't opt-in or opt-out on the default client. On the default client it is mandatory.
The reason I said it's opt-in is because moderation is added client-side by including the moderation service's DID in the `atproto-accept-labelers` HTTP header when sending requests to the appview.
So it is by-design opt-in, just in practice the "first party bluesky client" makes the choice for you for legal compliance reasons, and with an increasing hint-hint-nudge-nudge from the devs to use third party or forked clients to bypass the various legal restrictions countries keep trying to impose on them.
Yep, this is true, thanks for the clarification.
Another interesting bluesky integration as blog commenting system from some months ago https://www.coryzue.com/writing/bluesky-comments/
I would recommend https://cactus.chat/, which is based on matrix.
it has guest support (so people does not need a matrix account to comment), but if you use your own matrix account, you are essentially joining a matrix room per post.
This is interesting to me for the reason of having a way to interact with social media that isn't loading a social media feed. It would be great to put this on my blog and then have people able to comment on it, and basically the only way I interact with Blue Sky or any social media feed is through this kind of interface and through creating content.
Over the years I've found that any interaction with social media that involves me loading the feed inevitably ends up with me doomscrolling or spending way too much time scrolling stuff that doesn't add anything to my life. This could be a way to avoid that cycle, finally, but still interact with the wider social media world a little bit.
> Over the years I've found that any interaction with social media that involves me loading the feed inevitably ends up with me doomscrolling or spending way too much time scrolling stuff that doesn't add anything to my life.
Almost as if it was designed that way...
You are not hosting it so presumably BlueSky do. You say there is no platform lock in.
If BlueSky banned you tomorrow what is the plan? If BlueSky went bankrupt tomorrow?
I figure there are other AT compliant products that you can switch to but a lot of data would go missing?
If interested in understanding this topic in detail, https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net has information on running your own relay network, migrating data, etc as it relates to Bluesky and AT Proto. Work continues to enable data migration, portability, alternate relay networks, etc. https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t is particularly relevant.
(blog author works at bluesky, no affiliation personally)
So. You can back up your personal data to what is effectively a fancy tar ball (technically it's a collection of CAR files akin to what IPFS uses) and you can restore that to any PDS (personal data server) when you point your account there (either via your did:plc doc or via DNS records via did:web). So even if your current PDS implodes or bans you, you can just go somewhere else.
And of course there are several implementations and hosts for relays (the gossip nodes), PDS implementations, clients, and appviews (the server backend for bluesky the web app).
So strictly speaking if bluesky imploded tomorrow you could just use a self hosted version of the same app or use someone else's (such as https://zeppelin.social).
The PLC directory is still technically in bluesky's hands but is being transferred an independent foundation atm and could be trivially forked if needed. And of course if you use did:web that doesn't apply to you and you just depend on DNS.
But that's just your own posts isn't it? Wouldn't the replies from others, which would end up as comments on this author's blog, be in other users' CAR archives in each of their PDSes?
This is true. In the simple implementation, your blog would probably lose most comments if BlueSky went down and most users don't migrate to a new PDS.
However, atproto data is append-only and cache-friendly. It wouldn't be hard to record historical comments and join them to the ones returned by the live query. (I'm probably just going to script periodic backups for mine and worry about displaying them when/if BlueSky does dissappear.)
But then the only reason to use BlueSky is that your network is using it.
It’s a completely valid reason, but All the talk about platform lock in, independent nodes and relay and whatnot is just to make you feel better (I listened to some talks and podcasts but realized that it’s all just window dressing, you can be practically deplatformed at any time, so I’m hazy on the details).
At a minimum, the atproto provides an easy auth solution and public API for your app's data. Running a relay for your lexicon is basically the same as running a normal app server with those built in.
Credible exit matters too. The idea that all of this data is signed, public, and verifiable by anyone helps ensure that the provider is accountable to the community. A provider might decide against enshittifying a product if they're worried about a competitor doing better and taking their place.
Yes, an atproto lexicon will tend to be dominated by a small number of nodes. It's not the perfect distributed system some would prefer, but it is a real improvement on the completely centralized models seen everywhere today.
yep that'll be in their PDS. but that's the nature of the beast. you as the user control your data and your posts.
So if there's a large scale exodus from bluesky, as long as full backfills of the network exist, you'll be able to reconstruct your CAR files, etc even if your PDS dies.
So yes if they die all the comments disappear but people can reconstruct their history and move it to other PDS like blacksky, northsky, or others who are getting ready to start onboarding/open enrollment.
TLDR it'd be a bit rough if they died overnight but if it was a slow death and people had a bit of warning you'd see people move on to other PDS without issue.
Beyond this, BlueSky definitely kicks a lot of Libertarian and Right-leaning users off the platform. It seems to be okay if you're left of center or politically agnostic.
The problem with the mentality is that conservative ideas aren't ever censored, even on mainstream platforms like Instagram.
Rather, there is an association between modern conservative/libertarian voices and populist messaging - and all the pitfalls that come with it. Meaning, vulgarity, emotional bait, deception, and purposefully offensive language.
Like, the modern American conservative leadership cannot advertise their own ideology without resorting to lies and attacks of character. The left, by comparison, does not operate that way.
So, if you're censoring shitheads who are generally unliked, that might appear as though youre targeting conservatives or right leaning people. But you're not.
Basically, the right has purposefully positioned themselves to be associated with unpalatable ideas in order to leverage populist messaging. And this worked - they won an election. The downside is that now if you filter out unpalatable ideas such as blatant slurs you're going to necessarily mostly target right wing people. By accident.
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This is a claim that's going to require support. Bluesky's moderation service (just adds metadata/labels to posts/accounts) is all client side opt-in. It's force-enabled by the default client but any third party client allows you to opt-out (or doesn't even use it by default).
And PDS level/"account" bans are just at the PDS. If you've been "banned", that's just bluesky the PDS host telling you they don't want to host you and that you need to go host your data yourself or find someone else to host it for you. i.e. find another PDS.
Basically every form of ban or moderation in atproto/bluesky is "soft" moderation and you can fairly trivially bypass it and continue doing your own thing.
The overwhelming majority of right wing accounts that get banned do so soon after joining (and generally after going to pick fights). And they never even bother to try to keep their accounts, instead choosing to create new accounts to get banned again or abandon the platform. It's disingenuous behavior and for right wing personalities it feels almost more like a sticker of pride that they were "banned from bluesky".
Plenty of right leaning and libertarian accounts exist on bluesky. Project Liberal [1] and Liberal Party USA [2] (run by Josh Eakle[3] and Kevin Gaughen[4] respectively) exist just fine on bluesky and they are large splinter groups from the Libertarian Party following the whole Mises Caucus coup attempt thing. Likewise a number of libertarian groups such as the Libertarian Party of Lousiana [5] do just fine on bluesky. And of course AI and Cryptocurrency people also do just fine on bluesky as well despite the stereotypes against them and the common belief that "they aren't welcome on bluesky". The worst thing that happens is people block or mute you and you don't have to deal with them anymore rather than toxicly fighting each other each time you see each other.
TLDR: Everyone is welcome on bluesky but there's no requirement for people to tolerate you. Even if you violate every transgression, as long as you aren't posting literal child porn to the network you'll still be able to exist just fine however people might just ignore you.
------------
1. Project Liberal: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:d5nigw7kzpsglf3gtl2dvbev
2. Liberal Party USA: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:v3jmda7lwwdoofcvgmjwsbcg
3. Josh Eakle: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2adtngm3y6e6ol6jastnkxzm
4. Kevin Gaughen: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4oyecf2hz4ajhm4zqp52hxqo
5. LP of Lousiana: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:mongiv55fh5l5e7vi7cbjajw
And how many people even know there are other PDS's? You install the official bsky app, you create an account and the account gets deleted, how are you supposed to know? There's no message, warning, alert, etc.
The vast majority of people using Bluesky don't use a 3rd party or self-hosted PDS because they aren't and probably shouldn't have to be aware of it. It isn't even a prominent feature. At least with Mastodon, it's a big part of the culture at its' core... you don't see this with the official app even.
I didn't even know that was even an option until you mentioned it. I only know that there have been banned accounts on the official/default one that didn't even post anything yet.
> Bluesky's moderation service is all client side opt-in. It's force-enabled by the default client but any third party client allows you to opt-out
No matter how many times this pedantry gets repeated in this thread, this is literally not opt-in.
A light switch that is glued in place so you cannot turn it off is not opt-in.
Sure, some people with the know-how can get a pair of dikes and cut it out of the wall, the light will turn off and they will say "see, I opted out!"
But most people won't do this. At best it is misleading to say so.
The entire design of the architecture is for it to be driven primarily by the third party developers and the community. Bluesky the company does the bare minimum for legal compliance and every time there's an issue with legal compliance/moderation, the "first party" developers make threads to teach people how to use third party apps, etc to bypass the systems they are forced to implement.
The goal is that third party apps take over as the majority share of clients over time and the main impl should be seen as a "reference implementation".
And that of course ignores all the other non-bluesky projects currently incubating on atproto.
> And of course AI and Cryptocurrency people also do just fine on bluesky as well despite the stereotypes against them and the common belief that "they aren't welcome on bluesky".
"do just fine" is really pushing it I think. I don't think the core mod team or the default-client's moderation service is biased toward the right or the left (at least in how they apply moderation, not necessarily their personal beliefs.) I think the core team is doing the best job they can given their resourcing. The community on the site is a different story.
There was an attempt by AI researchers to join the site and they all got bullied until they left, largely by the community. Pretty much every reply to an NYT article that doesn't denigrate Trump is either "wow how does the NYT have the time to write about fashion/lifestyle/<anything but how Trump is awful>, it's because they've an evil right wing publication" or "how dare the NYT platform this opinion it's an evil right wing opinion". If you look at feature rollouts or social posts by the team you get lots of well-liked comments about how the mod team enables right wing behavior.
I use the platform a lot and am really rooting for them to succeed, but I feel that there's just a lot of lefty toxicity on the platform and that the community on there loves politics and often brings politics into unrelated threads. They seem interested in a sort of pop politics too, not the kind of harder political analysis that a good think tank or non-fiction book can provide either. I feel that if you're into lots of pop left politics and the culture that emerges from a community with this love then you'll like Bluesky. For now I think the community is too political to really foster wider conversations the way pre-Elon Twitter did.
I’ve read all of those profiles and they all seem to lean progressive. If your argument is that there’s a diversity of thought, that proof is not enough.
I'm specifically targeting the libertarian side of the original comment as I don't keep up with authoritarian conservatives and I generally don't want to engage with them (nor do I the authoritarian left).
LPLouisiana is definitely left leaning libertarian but the first 4 are all very much your old school small government libertarians.
Both Josh Eakle and Kevin Gaughen used to be senior members of the Libertarian Party prior to the Mises Caucus burning it to the ground and they are absolutely center right libertarians through and through.
Bluesky moderation has been fairly even handed as far as I have seen. They also ban plenty of leftists and trans activists when these happen to exceed the ToS. And good luck if you’re a Palestinian trying to fundraise on the platform; they get banned by the hundreds.
Is there any social network in the USA which is not banning Palestinians?
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>* stop talking out of your ass*
Please don't break the site guidelines like this, no matter how incorrect another comment is or you feel it is.
Doing this has the obvious downside of making the threads more toxic, plus the less obvious one of discrediting the truth (assuming your comment is indeed correct) by giving it toxic associations. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
edited
That's better, thanks, and I don't mean to pile on! but why include "Clearly you don't use it"?
One can't conclude that for sure, it's unnecessarily personal, and it doesn't add anything (other than a swipe) to the correct information in your post.
That's funny, because the team is also regularly accused of being "libertarian tech bros"
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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Is it perhaps that the "right-leaning" social media users being banned are also violating the rules? Attacks and abuse seem to be standard practice, especially for the American right.
What rules are we talking about? Because my Bluesky feed (the Discover section) is filled with name-calling, hints at political violence, etc. all coming from liberal/left accounts.
Seems like you might be preoccupied with rage bait and you think that it’s actually real
That's not my experience at all.
Only thing I’m wondering about with this is how do you moderate the comments? Delete spam or rude comments?
At least for Mastodon comments, there are two easy ways:
- Run the comments on an instance you moderate
- Even better, only show comments that your account has favourited.
More details on the last one here:
https://hci.social/@ryanatkn/111983960076822015
> Even better, only show comments that your account has favourited.
Yeah I like this solution. Might try explore this approach
How is this different from any other self hosted solution; you've still got to manage spam yourself. Might as well go self hosted.
Spam isn't the only challenge of going self-hosted and it's cool to tie into an existing ecosystem for identity. Also it's pretty neat that people can engage outside of your website while you still get to pick what gets surfaced on your own website.
I have a static site. Self hosted would mean I’d need a database and I think right now I want to keep the static generation. Happy to try self hosted in future and write my own solution but right now I got plenty of side projects
Most Mastodon instances already have moderation. Can that be leveraged? Or does it tend to be too permissive?
If I only show comments from a well-moderated Mastodon instance that my main account is on, plus any instances that it federates with, does that not solve the problem?
Bluesky allows thread owners to hide posts from the thread.
Presumably the blog interface itself can choose to simply not surface hidden replies at all; if you view the thread via a different client (eg the Bluesky app) you would have the option of seeing the hidden posts.
And of course if you view the thread through your own Bluesky interface your personal blocklists and moderation would apply to the thread.
I'm not sure if this implements it, but Bluesky has an API to hide replies (called thread gating). It's a separate API call though, so you don't get it automatically when loading a thread via the API.
I built a web component for the same purpose, and you can see in there how I implemented threadgating: https://github.com/ascorbic/bluesky-comments-tag
You can only hide them. Bluesky also can’t block users, only hide them from your timelines (if you’re using an app that respects that). It’s quite limited compared to Mastodon in that regard.
This is an amazing idea! Not only if fixes the problem of commenting but also allow people to continue the conversion on Bluesky. Well done!
ActivityPub for Wordpress just posted about a bridge with Bluesky https://activitypub.blog/2025/08/07/bridging-the-gap/
I wish Bluesky would reveal their full idea on how they’re going to monetise. All this chatter how they’re different because they have this super complicated architecture always comes short of revealing what happens when they start charging for things.
Nice. But what about moderation?
Id love a term for this sort of thing. It's like tech hijacking or something. Google sheets as a backend, github discussions for a comment system, etc.
Lately I've got the goal of stuffing anything that can possibly be stuffed with photos stuffed with photos -- that and dislodging the sneaker brand that stole my 3-character handle I was using in LoL long ago from the SERPs.
Always looking for new places.
It's not really hijacking in this case, Bluesky is built for this on purpose.
Reminds me of https://indieweb.org/Webmention
If you're on Quarto, I have a plugin that does this (with fediverse support)
https://github.com/AndreasThinks/quarto-open-social-comments
See also: Toot toot! Mastodon-powered Blog Comments [2023]
https://cassidyjames.com/blog/fediverse-blog-comments-mastod...
I like this a lot! I don't have a blog, but this kind of makes me want to start one.
Composable internet will win over end to end closed systems
This is why I originally built FastComments :) and then I ended up working on that and not blogging much.
Neat integration with bluesky, though.
The outline on the right is nice.
Interesting. Could something like this be done for Mastodon / ActivityPub?
People have been doing this with ActivityPub/Mastodon for years: https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta...
That's cool, didn't know that!
Back in 2011 my gut reaction was to treat the embedding of Discus comments and 'roll yourself a quickie comment section' as the end of something good and the beginning of something bad. Completely invisible to your average user, both the potential for 'central lockdown'and cross site tracking that was 'invisible'. Outsourcing a common webmaster maintenance task in a way that affected other people in ways they didn't realize. At first. We Men Who Yell At Clouds remember the before times. Discus was the first commonly used script embed, even when people were copying and downloading,installing,serving their own libraries instead of linking to creepy sites.
Security's better now in general. But the same hands-on approach sometimes brought us widely exploited 0-days. Drupal was obnoxious. Yet people knew throbbing banner ads were cross-site things in a way you could turn off.
I love the approach but I’d go with Mastodon which is an actual open protocol with multiple servers and clients and clearly not for profit
To be clear, so is blue sky – you can run a Bluesky server yourself just like mastodon
Do you know anyone who does? There's many big and open Mastodon instances but I've yet to see a Bluesky one.
You normally don't notice tbh. Switching PDS is entirely invisible to the frontend. There's a lot of self hosted PDS users (since it's basically a small go router + sqlite) but there's also bigger community PDS projects being spun up including blacksky and northsky.
As for frontends, there's a bunch of them and a lot of them focus on changing the UX. But for self hosted "bluesky", there is https://deer.social which is a forked client that still relies on the bluesky appview/backend and there is https://zeppelin.social which is downstream of deer social but also runs their own appview independent of "big bluesky".
Thanks for the explanation, I was almost certain I'm missing something.
> Do you know anyone who does?
One example of a profile that lives on a different PDS ("AT Protocol Personal Data Server") than the default one: https://bsky.app/profile/mackuba.eu
If you look in the bottom left of https://clearsky.app/mackuba.eu/history, it shows:
> User changed [...] 1/2/2025 to external server PDS: https://lab.martianbase.net
If you go to that URL, you'll see the landing page for the atproto PDS software.
Edit: Ah, and seems Kuba is hosting a directory of profiles using their own PDS as well, lots of examples over there: https://blue.mackuba.eu/directory/pdses
Biggest one right now (excluding the default one) seems to be atproto.brid.gy, which has 40393 accounts.
Not only is the bluesky network highly centralized right now, its UI is designed to perpetually lock users into the main bluesky server. Even if you use your own identity, when sharing the URLs to the posts via the UI, the URL defaults to bsky dot app domain, which will break if the author ever moves to a second server.
That's not actually true.
1. If you switch PDS all links continue working.
2. If you change your handle (for did:plc, did:web can't do this because DNS) it used to break links but nowadays this isn't a problem because handle resolution respects historical handle naming (I think it works by post+handle age but I can't remember).
3. Also if you share posts using the did syntax instead of handle syntax (which bluesky seems to be slowly changing over to, at least profiles do this now), it's stable regardless of handle changes.
4. If you want to switch frontends, you can use an extension or app like at://wormhole to do so. UX for this should improve over time but that's a big "eventually".
5. Hopefully the at:// URI format catches on but that's a long ways away given that browsers make using custom URIs an absolute nightmare.
It’s odd to eliminate using GitHub issues as comments because the user would need a GitHub account then decide on bluesky. Bluesky would also require users to have a Bluesky account? How many readers already have a GitHub account vs already have a Bluesky account?
I mean it’s fine, use whatever your comfortable with and Bluesky is the next frontier for development ideas.
As of this comment, Bluesky has ~38M users. To sign up is trivial, and doesn't constrain you to folks who already have a Github account or would sign up for one (tech weighted). Skate to where the puck is going. I suppose including a link to the Bluesky sign up page near the discussion section of a post would be helpful, for those not yet onboarded who want to immediately discuss or intend to in the future.
https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
EDIT: Ask five people you know outside of tech if they have a Github account. Everyone I know outside of tech moved to Bluesky from Twitter. No one I know outside of tech has a Github account. If I encounter someone who has neither, I'm of course going to recommend a Bluesky account from a utility perspective, as they're likely never going to contribute code, issues, discussion on GH if not a tech person. (most of my network is non tech, non startup, non SV people, ymmv; HN is the closest I get to tech folks most of the time)
38M is the number of accounts registered. It seems like the number of users is lower and falling.
Ehhh the metric for active users is a bit weird. The metric is "daily active likers" but I know a lot of people lurk and don't like posts often. I personally rarely like posts unless I think to go out of my way to do so but I browse the site daily.
And even then while "daily active likers" is down half from 6 months ago, it's still up substantially from even just a month or two prior to that. Bluesky exploded in size at the start of the year and it seems to be finally settling into a steady state with gradual growth (vs the prior explosive growth + falloff).
"Daily records" (at the bottom of the page) is a bit better metric of overall network activity and even though it has also fallen since peak it shows there's still an order of magnitude more activity on network than prior to blowing up.
I have at least 10 accounts myself.
The puck is not going to bluesky. Ads are back on X. Many who claim to have left have returned. Bluesky is the far leftist version of gab, no matter how you don’t like people saying that.
I’m among that 31M who signed up (as are many of my friends) and only the most left ones are still using it. I trolled for a couple of days until it got boring.
I don't know a single person outside of tech who has a bluesky account. I know very few people in tech who do.
There are quite a number of authors, comedians, artists, and the like on Bluesky. A few examples:
Bill Corbett: https://bsky.app/profile/billcorbett.bsky.social
John Scalzi: https://bsky.app/profile/scalzi.com
Wil Wheaton: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:mwpiq2rr6joccohcz2urkwvn
NY Times Pitchbot: https://bsky.app/profile/nytpitchbot.bsky.social
Electrek: https://bsky.app/profile/electrek.co
Stephen King: https://bsky.app/profile/stephenking.bsky.social
Eric Idle: https://bsky.app/profile/ericidle.bsky.social
Github has a lot more than 38M users so I'm not sure what point you are making with that figure
Well, github has 225 million users, so bluesky needs to catch up.
Bluesky is already dying and has 38M registered users to Githubs 225M users. Github is growing, and Bluesky isn't. By your own suggestion, they should have used Github.
You can host your own Bluesky instance and federate across instances, with all the data you host stored in an open an portable format, can you do the same with GitHub?
It’s coming in gitea: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/20311
I would be willing to guess that self hosting gitea as a backup mirror is less work than doing the same for Bluesky. But, just speculating
yooooo nat
I saw the post and was like eyyyyyy that's oomf.
[dead]
[flagged]
laughs communistly
One of the many reasons I can't get a security clearance was that I received an invitation on red paper to go to a Christmas party put on by this organization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_USA
so I did and got photographed with weird Soviet cameras and shook hands with Gus Hall who was dressed up as Santa Claus and saying "Ho Ho Ho!"
(My wife and I were so antinomian that our hippie outfits got us described as "the strangest people in NYC" in front of the Fox News headquarters, which wasn't hard to do in the conformist 1990s, then we took the bus to Manchester, NH, arrived at 4am and figured there was no reason not to walk out to the suburbs and shocked my mom when we knocked on the door around 7am)
That is excellent.
Username checks out. ^_^b