Comments are tricky - they're nice for engagement (as if anyone's reading this stuff), but moderation can be a hassle, and for a static site like this, many of the options require you to pay for hosting, or require you to send (your reader's) information to 3rd parties etc.
But I recently saw a few examples of people using Mastodon - the twitter-like social platform that's part of the "fediverse" or "decentralized social web" - to serve comments on their site.
- The main source of inspiration from Jan Wildeboer
- Some other helpful code and links from Cassidy Blaede
But a lot of what I was seeing was using the jekyll static site generator, and given I know basically nothing about javascript (which is required here), I ended up needing some help from an LLM (claude) to get it working with Franklin.jl, which I'm using for this blog.
But I did! I should do a more complete write-up at some point, because I learned some things that may be helpful to other folks in a similar situation, but this post was really just an excuse to test the functionality.
Comments
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