7 ms·

Building Bluesky comments for my blog

382 points by g0xA52A2A 1y ago

ulrischa 1y ago
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
throwmeaway222 1y ago
The outline on the right is nice.
MrPapz 1y ago
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!
slackr 1y ago
Nice. But what about moderation?
aranw 1y ago
Only thing I’m wondering about with this is how do you moderate the comments? Delete spam or rude comments?
- jszymborski 1y ago
  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 https://hci.social/@ryanatkn/111983960076822015
  - aranw 1y ago
    > Even better, only show comments that your account has favourited. Yeah I like this solution. Might try explore this approach
    - _hyn3 1y ago
      How is this different from any other self hosted solution; you've still got to manage spam yourself. Might as well go self hosted.
      - aranw 1y ago
        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
      - eat_veggies 1y ago
        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.
  - archagon 1y ago
    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?
- jameshart 1y ago
  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.
- ascorbic 1y ago
  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 https://github.com/ascorbic/bluesky-comments-tag
- isodev 1y ago
  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.
mmattbtw 1y ago
yooooo nat
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y ago
  I saw the post and was like eyyyyyy that's oomf.
hk1337 1y ago
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.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  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 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)
  - zufallsheld 1y ago
    Well, github has 225 million users, so bluesky needs to catch up.
  - trothamel 1y ago
    38M is the number of accounts registered. It seems like the number of users is lower and falling.
    - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y ago
      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.
artursapek 1y ago
[flagged]
- UtopiaPunk 1y ago
  laughs communistly
  - TimorousBestie 1y ago
    Username checks out. ^_^b
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    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 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)
    - UtopiaPunk 1y ago
      That is excellent.
kdrvr 1y ago
Feels like Bluesky is single-handedly making the Internet an open for new ideas again
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  "Protocols, not platforms." As the kids say, "build mode" but building what can't be captured, enshittified, etc.
- UtopiaPunk 1y ago
  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.
- sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
  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.
  - TimorousBestie 1y ago
    > 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.
philipwhiuk 1y ago
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.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  I really believe in https://indieweb.org/POSSE 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 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114988462585487831
  - ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
    I think BlueSky should lean into this and operate as a domain registrar like Squarespace does.
    - biggestfan 1y ago
      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.
  - spartanatreyu 1y ago
    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?
    - PaulHoule 1y ago
      You should use both of them and have tools to automate that.
- 1y ago
oellegaard 1y ago
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
- ezfe 1y ago
  To be clear, so is blue sky – you can run a Bluesky server yourself just like mastodon
  - dewey 1y ago
    Do you know anyone who does? There's many big and open Mastodon instances but I've yet to see a Bluesky one.
    - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y ago
      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 https://deer.social which is a forked client that still relies on the bluesky appview/backend and there is https://zeppelin.social https://zeppelin.social which is downstream of deer social but also runs their own appview independent of "big bluesky".
      - dewey 1y ago
        Thanks for the explanation, I was almost certain I'm missing something.
    - diggan 1y ago
      > 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 https://bsky.app/profile/mackuba.eu If you look in the bottom left of https://clearsky.app/mackuba.eu/history https://clearsky.app/mackuba.eu/history, it shows: > User changed [...] 1/2/2025 to external server PDS: https://lab.martianbase.net 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 https://blue.mackuba.eu/directory/pdses Biggest one right now (excluding the default one) seems to be atproto.brid.gy, which has 40393 accounts.
nonethewiser 1y ago
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.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  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.
- Retr0id 1y ago
  It's not really hijacking in this case, Bluesky is built for this on purpose.
ThinkBeat 1y ago
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?
- tracker1 1y ago
  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.
  - LeoPanthera 1y ago
    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.
    - umbra07 1y ago
      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.
      - LeoPanthera 1y ago
        That's not my experience at all.
      - kouru225 1y ago
        Seems like you might be preoccupied with rage bait and you think that it’s actually real
  - TimorousBestie 1y ago
    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.
nonethewiser 1y ago
>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).
- abhinavk 1y ago
  They had another blog as per archive.org
zunio 1y ago
[dead]
UtopiaPunk 1y ago
I like this a lot! I don't have a blog, but this kind of makes me want to start one.
notsahil 1y ago
Reminds me of https://indieweb.org/Webmention https://indieweb.org/Webmention
xd1936 1y ago
See also: Toot toot! Mastodon-powered Blog Comments [2023] https://cassidyjames.com/blog/fediverse-blog-comments-mastodon/ https://cassidyjames.com/blog/fediverse-blog-comments-mastod...
susam 1y ago
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 https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/form.lisp [2] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/site.lisp https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/site.lisp [3] https://susam.net/comments/ https://susam.net/comments/
- mighmi 1y ago
  Taking comments via a (n email) form, which you then manually add under the article's html/markdown is nice.
  - justusthane 1y ago
    That's what I do, except I skip the form and just provide my email address at the bottom of each post.
- AndrewStephens 1y ago
  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.
maelito 1y ago
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 https://cartes.app, based on Bluesky. Not trivial though, you have to create a lexicon and maintain a DB based on the Bluesky stream.
- dom96 1y ago
  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/ https://scrapboard.org/ 2 - https://docs.bsky.app/docs/api/com-atproto-repo-get-record https://docs.bsky.app/docs/api/com-atproto-repo-get-record
- pietervdvn 1y ago
  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
  - maelito 1y ago
    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...
    - maelito 1y ago
      Also, to my knowledge, Mangroves does not provide photo upload. Panoramax is the way to for outdoor pictures, but not for inside.
    - pietervdvn 1y ago
      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
axelpacheco 1y ago
Composable internet will win over end to end closed systems
tomgag 1y ago
Interesting. Could something like this be done for Mastodon / ActivityPub?
- lucius_verus 1y ago
  People have been doing this with ActivityPub/Mastodon for years: https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-static-blog-with-mastodon/ https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta...
  - tomgag 1y ago
    That's cool, didn't know that!
uxjw 1y ago
ActivityPub for Wordpress just posted about a bridge with Bluesky https://activitypub.blog/2025/08/07/bridging-the-gap/ https://activitypub.blog/2025/08/07/bridging-the-gap/
jslakro 1y ago
Another interesting bluesky integration as blog commenting system from some months ago https://www.coryzue.com/writing/bluesky-comments/ https://www.coryzue.com/writing/bluesky-comments/
zhivota 1y ago
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.
- koen_hendriks 1y ago
  > 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...
fishywang 1y ago
I would recommend https://cactus.chat/ 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.
isodev 1y ago
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.
HocusLocus 1y ago
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.
Brajeshwar 1y ago
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://brajeshwar.com/2025/can-i-walk-out/
- Unit327 1y ago
  https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/ https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/
winrid 1y ago
This is why I originally built FastComments :) and then I ended up working on that and not blogging much. Neat integration with bluesky, though.
crimsoneer 1y ago
If you're on Quarto, I have a plugin that does this (with fediverse support) https://github.com/AndreasThinks/quarto-open-social-comments https://github.com/AndreasThinks/quarto-open-social-comments
0x445442 1y ago
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.
- integralid 1y ago
  >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.
  - dmd 1y ago
    > More people have HN accounts than bluesky accounts You really think that?

382 points by g0xA52A2A 1y ago

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

throwmeaway222 1y ago

The outline on the right is nice.

MrPapz 1y ago

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!

slackr 1y ago

Nice. But what about moderation?

aranw 1y ago

Only thing I’m wondering about with this is how do you moderate the comments? Delete spam or rude comments?

jszymborski 1y ago
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 https://hci.social/@ryanatkn/111983960076822015
- aranw 1y ago
  > Even better, only show comments that your account has favourited. Yeah I like this solution. Might try explore this approach
  - _hyn3 1y ago
    How is this different from any other self hosted solution; you've still got to manage spam yourself. Might as well go self hosted.
    - aranw 1y ago
      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
    - eat_veggies 1y ago
      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.
- archagon 1y ago
  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?
jameshart 1y ago
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.
ascorbic 1y ago
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 https://github.com/ascorbic/bluesky-comments-tag
isodev 1y ago
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.

mmattbtw 1y ago

yooooo nat

OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y ago
I saw the post and was like eyyyyyy that's oomf.

hk1337 1y ago

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.

toomuchtodo 1y ago
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 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)
- zufallsheld 1y ago
  Well, github has 225 million users, so bluesky needs to catch up.
- trothamel 1y ago
  38M is the number of accounts registered. It seems like the number of users is lower and falling.
  - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y ago
    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.

artursapek 1y ago

[flagged]

UtopiaPunk 1y ago
laughs communistly
- TimorousBestie 1y ago
  Username checks out. ^_^b
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  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 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)
  - UtopiaPunk 1y ago
    That is excellent.

kdrvr 1y ago

Feels like Bluesky is single-handedly making the Internet an open for new ideas again

toomuchtodo 1y ago
"Protocols, not platforms." As the kids say, "build mode" but building what can't be captured, enshittified, etc.
UtopiaPunk 1y ago
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.
sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
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.
- TimorousBestie 1y ago
  > 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.

philipwhiuk 1y ago

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.

PaulHoule 1y ago
I really believe in https://indieweb.org/POSSE 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 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114988462585487831
- ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
  I think BlueSky should lean into this and operate as a domain registrar like Squarespace does.
  - biggestfan 1y ago
    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.
- spartanatreyu 1y ago
  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?
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    You should use both of them and have tools to automate that.
1y ago

oellegaard 1y ago

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

ezfe 1y ago
To be clear, so is blue sky – you can run a Bluesky server yourself just like mastodon
- dewey 1y ago
  Do you know anyone who does? There's many big and open Mastodon instances but I've yet to see a Bluesky one.
  - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y ago
    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 https://deer.social which is a forked client that still relies on the bluesky appview/backend and there is https://zeppelin.social https://zeppelin.social which is downstream of deer social but also runs their own appview independent of "big bluesky".
    - dewey 1y ago
      Thanks for the explanation, I was almost certain I'm missing something.
  - diggan 1y ago
    > 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 https://bsky.app/profile/mackuba.eu If you look in the bottom left of https://clearsky.app/mackuba.eu/history https://clearsky.app/mackuba.eu/history, it shows: > User changed [...] 1/2/2025 to external server PDS: https://lab.martianbase.net 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 https://blue.mackuba.eu/directory/pdses Biggest one right now (excluding the default one) seems to be atproto.brid.gy, which has 40393 accounts.

nonethewiser 1y ago

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.

PaulHoule 1y ago
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.
Retr0id 1y ago
It's not really hijacking in this case, Bluesky is built for this on purpose.

ThinkBeat 1y ago

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?

tracker1 1y ago
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.
- LeoPanthera 1y ago
  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.
  - umbra07 1y ago
    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.
    - LeoPanthera 1y ago
      That's not my experience at all.
    - kouru225 1y ago
      Seems like you might be preoccupied with rage bait and you think that it’s actually real
- TimorousBestie 1y ago
  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.

nonethewiser 1y ago

>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).

abhinavk 1y ago
They had another blog as per archive.org

zunio 1y ago

[dead]

UtopiaPunk 1y ago

I like this a lot! I don't have a blog, but this kind of makes me want to start one.

notsahil 1y ago

Reminds me of https://indieweb.org/Webmention https://indieweb.org/Webmention

xd1936 1y ago

See also: Toot toot! Mastodon-powered Blog Comments [2023] https://cassidyjames.com/blog/fediverse-blog-comments-mastodon/ https://cassidyjames.com/blog/fediverse-blog-comments-mastod...

susam 1y ago

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 https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/form.lisp [2] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/site.lisp https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/site.lisp [3] https://susam.net/comments/ https://susam.net/comments/

mighmi 1y ago
Taking comments via a (n email) form, which you then manually add under the article's html/markdown is nice.
- justusthane 1y ago
  That's what I do, except I skip the form and just provide my email address at the bottom of each post.
AndrewStephens 1y ago
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.

maelito 1y ago

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 https://cartes.app, based on Bluesky. Not trivial though, you have to create a lexicon and maintain a DB based on the Bluesky stream.

dom96 1y ago
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/ https://scrapboard.org/ 2 - https://docs.bsky.app/docs/api/com-atproto-repo-get-record https://docs.bsky.app/docs/api/com-atproto-repo-get-record
pietervdvn 1y ago
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
- maelito 1y ago
  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...
  - maelito 1y ago
    Also, to my knowledge, Mangroves does not provide photo upload. Panoramax is the way to for outdoor pictures, but not for inside.
  - pietervdvn 1y ago
    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

axelpacheco 1y ago

Composable internet will win over end to end closed systems

tomgag 1y ago

Interesting. Could something like this be done for Mastodon / ActivityPub?

lucius_verus 1y ago
People have been doing this with ActivityPub/Mastodon for years: https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-static-blog-with-mastodon/ https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta...
- tomgag 1y ago
  That's cool, didn't know that!

uxjw 1y ago

ActivityPub for Wordpress just posted about a bridge with Bluesky https://activitypub.blog/2025/08/07/bridging-the-gap/ https://activitypub.blog/2025/08/07/bridging-the-gap/

jslakro 1y ago

Another interesting bluesky integration as blog commenting system from some months ago https://www.coryzue.com/writing/bluesky-comments/ https://www.coryzue.com/writing/bluesky-comments/

zhivota 1y ago

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.

koen_hendriks 1y ago
> 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...

fishywang 1y ago

I would recommend https://cactus.chat/ 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.

isodev 1y ago

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.

HocusLocus 1y ago

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.

Brajeshwar 1y ago

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://brajeshwar.com/2025/can-i-walk-out/

Unit327 1y ago
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/ https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/

winrid 1y ago

This is why I originally built FastComments :) and then I ended up working on that and not blogging much. Neat integration with bluesky, though.

crimsoneer 1y ago

If you're on Quarto, I have a plugin that does this (with fediverse support) https://github.com/AndreasThinks/quarto-open-social-comments https://github.com/AndreasThinks/quarto-open-social-comments

0x445442 1y ago

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.

integralid 1y ago
>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.
- dmd 1y ago
  > More people have HN accounts than bluesky accounts You really think that?