Replacing Disqus with Mastodon Comments
11 points by soulcutter
11 points by soulcutter
I didn't want to give up a simple comment box for casual visitors and also not want to throw away a decade of disqus comments. But I also wanted to integrate mastodon replies. So I wrote my own commenting system: https://meh.splitbrain.org/
Did something similar. Used the WP ActivityPub plugin to make the blog an active participant in the fediverse. People can follow new posts there; they can also interact and comment directly from their Mastodon account, and it will show up on the article page. Works surprisingly well.
I've considered it, but in the end I decided not to tie my blog to a particular social media platform (even a decentralised one like Mastodon/ActivityPub). The friction on Mastodon is also particularly high for site visitors, as I needed to either search for the toot URL on my instance or perform an additional login from their instance's UI.
I ended up self-hosting comentario. It supports anonymous comments and also OAuth, so I think that's a good way to enable everyone to comment.
I do notice that many more people would rather comment on social media than directly on my blog, though (ironically, I decide to comment here rather than via the Mastodon comment mechanism on their website).
ActivityPub is a web standard and thus probably a quite safe bet. I'll soon rework my comment system too, and will probably use a combination of Mastodon, Webmentions, and mail.
Good point. I do want to keep what I have. It allows casual visitors and people without an ActivityPub account to comment. It also has (though not a lot) old comments that I want to preserve.
But maybe a "combination" approach can work well. I can add support for Mastodon and Webmention. I already have "pulling mastodon comments" functionality implemented in the microblog section of my site, so why not use that for my main blog posts too?