ilyessThird party comment provider like Disqus or Github
Native comment management
Webmentions
Other (please specify in the comments)
Poll ended at .
pieceofthepie 
@ilyess I use an OSS app called Remark42. Essentially a self hosted Disqus. I went with it as it was dead simple to set up on a static site and supported importing from Wordpress.
@pieceofthepie Very interesting! Thanks for sharing.
How has your experience been with moderation and fighting spam?
@ilyess touch wood, I've had no issues at. I don't remember having any spam at all. Maybe that's cause it's naturally resistant, maybe it's because traffic is very light.
@pieceofthepie That's great! The comment section looks nice and fits well within the overall theme of your blog. I guess you can easily style that section in Remark42? I need to investigate this further; it looks promising.
By the way, do you have an RSS feed for your blog I can add to my reader? I love the stuff you write about.
@ilyess actually I think that's pretty much stock styling. It just happened to slot in well - but then I did make the theme so I was able to make adjustments.
There is an atom feed though I've not tested it in anger. It should be discoverable as its all tagged up appropriately.
@pieceofthepie You're right. My RSS reader was able to figure out the feed link from the homepage automatically. It seems to work fine. Thank you!
Simon Rolfmore@cloudthethings That's cool! Do you know if they have a built-in spam detection system or you're expected to moderate comments manually?
sotolf@ilyess I have no comments, people will have to reach out to me some other way.
@sotolf Thanks for your reply. That's what I have going right now as well.
Šime Vidas@ilyess At the end of blog posts, I link to my post (toot) on Mastodon about that blog post. People can comment on Mastodon.
@simevidas Thank you. It seems to be a common practice. I've been using it for a long time and I'd say that it works relatively well. It just sucks that to view comments one must jump to another website, as opposed to having them listed under the blog post (there are ways to pull comments from Mastodon, but it's a one-way/read-only integration).
Also, for anyone to contribute to the discussion they must have a Fediverse account, but to view the blog post no account is required.
Wayne Werner@ilyess just online chat. I wanna add some activity pub support cause that would be cool AF but...
Nothing real yet.
@ketmorco Totally! ActivityPub support would be really nice. I believe Wordpress has it already, but I haven't seen any full integration for static websites yet.
What do you mean "online chat"?
piofthings@ilyess comments? Are your crazy 🤣🫣! Use that javascript plugin that keeps comments in browser local cache so only the commenter can see it! (Sorry I am old and cynical 🙈)
@piofthings I know! 🤣 Comments aren't easy to operate, and their benefits are debatable.
Keeping per-user comments in the browser cache is hilarious (first time I hear about this). But also, kind of evil :P
Timo TijhofEmail preset link in RSS post footer.
Email preset link in website post page footer.
Public comments on Mastodon / Lobsters / HackerNews.
@krinkle Thank you. So you publish a link to your blog post on all 3 platforms for comments? Which one is the best / attracts more meaningful discussions, in your opinion?
Mastodon. Human, insightful, and part of a larger continued conversation where some folks turning up again a few weeks/months later.
I rarely submit things to HackerNews, usually someone else does it first. It drives traffic, but I don't find its comments worth responding to or otherwise interesting as part of a larger conversation. It's not "social" in the way I look for.
I submit to Lobsters as courtesy, quiet comments, focused on passive upvote and hashtag discovery. Like Digg!
@krinkle I'm getting the same vibes from Mastodon. Never really felt the need to look elsewhere TBH.
Thanks for your insights on HackerNews and Lobsters!
G Allen@ilyess Folk can email me if they want to say something . Comment spam management is a full time job.
@vollink Thanks. Yeah, I agree that comment management could become a burden.
Email correspondence is not exactly the same, though. Comments can foster a richer discussion by having different folks chime in under the same thread. Email is mostly 1 on 1, like a private message to the author.
By the way, I also use email in addition to Mastodon to gather feedback.
Tony Finch@ilyess i invite people to comment on the fediverse, and i publish a copy on dreamwidth which allows comments, but i don’t have any comments on my own website
@fanf Thanks! I didn't know about dreamwidth. Do you get interesting comments on that platform?
@ilyess very occasionally :-) i haven’t been effective at finding other dreamwidth users with similar interests outside my real-world friends so i mostly use it as an rss reader, much less for its comment features
@fanf How do you use it as an RSS reader? You can subscribe to RSS feeds through Dreamwidth?
Anthony Sorace
Chad Pytel@ilyess no comments.
@cpytel Thank you! Not even feedback through email? Some folks, including myself, also publish the blog post on the Fediverse to have a conversation that way. Have you considered this approach?
@ilyess Yes, we post everything @thoughtbot, but we don’t hear a ton back from that.
Jeremy HerveI answered “native comment management” because that’s what I use to store a copy of the comments and display them on my blog, and anyone can indeed still use the comment form under my posts to leave a comment. In practice though, 99% of the comments on my blog are posts on the Fediverse, replies to my post federated to my site.
“Real” comments are mostly dead these days, unfortunately. I’m glad my blog is federated or I would see zero interaction under my posts. 😔
ilyess (@[email protected])
If you have a blog, what do you use for comment management? #blog #comments #indieWeb #poll [ ] Third party comment provider like Disqus or Github [ ] Native comment management [ ] Webmentions [ ] Other (please specify in the comments)
IrgndSonDepp@ilyess I announce all new blog posts on Fedi and add a link to that Fedi post in the blog post.
For a while I displayed a static copy of all the Fedi replies on my posts, but I felt like it didn't add much and just cluttered the page.
I wrote about the technical implementation (with Hugo) here
https://schafe-sind-bessere-rasenmaeher.de/tech/static-comments-for-my-static-blog/
. Doing it without JavaScript is a terrible idea and requires you to constantly rebuild your static page. I just did it to prove that I can. Well... and I want to keep my blog free of JS for as long as possible.
If you're going for something like that, I like @beejjorgensen 's approach way better:
@ilyess Of course with Fedi you'll need to build your own moderation system, which can be as easy as blocking certain usernames and/or reply ids. But it doesn't come with it out if the box.
And then there are people who set their posts to be deleted after X, which may break the flow of conversation in the replies.
On my old account I had set all Fedi posts to expire after 3 months, which was also part of why I decided to remove the comments from my blog. They would have disappeared eventually anyway.
And then there are people who set their posts to be deleted after X, which may break the flow of conversation in the replies.
On my old account I had set all Fedi posts to expire after 3 months, which was also part of why I decided to remove the comments from my blog. They would have disappeared eventually anyway.
@irgndsondepp That's a good point! Moderation is a big one. I'm not sure how this strategy would scale. The fediverse isn't immune to nasty content and trolls, unfortunately.
@ilyess Yeah. And when you've blocked the trolls on your account or instance, that means you no longer "see" the nasty stuff, but it's still there. In the worst case it gets mirrored as comments to your blog without you noticing at all. 😬
@irgndsondepp Yeah, so you have to find another way of filtering out bad comments/commenters on your website. The blog post you linked suggests to maintain a set of reply/account IDs to keep out of the comments list, which works but boy does it sound tedious. 😅
@irgndsondepp I had a feeling of deja vu while reading your post. It turns out I had already seen it when I was exploring this topic before xD
Leveraging Fediverse replies as a commenting system for a blog is a nifty trick. I've seen it deployed in many blogs out there. It does come with limitations though, like being read-only.
half/byte@ilyess I used Disqus for a long time and I got rid of it at a point where it became mostly spam. No I don't have comments and I am looking into the open source alternatives every now and then to see if I can bring them back, but so far I found nothing that was worth it to add a non static component.
@halfbyte Thank you! I agree that adding a dynamic component to a static website kind of defeats the point. Plus, spam is real and I don't think we have a robust solution for it just yet.
jens persson
donutage (Bill Cole)
Pixel Purrito@ilyess no comments, they're not worth the hassle.
@aperezdc I agree. Native comment management can easily turn into a chore. Other solutions are pretty hands-off though, like publishing the blog post on other the Fediverse and leveraging its comment/reply system. Have you tried that?
Earthshine@ilyess No comments
@earthshine No comments of any shape or form? Why is that?
readbeanicecream@ilyess Integrated mastodon comments.
@readbeanicecream Thanks. I'm assuming you mean a one-way read-only integration where you pull a list of replies from Mastodon to display on your blog. Is that right?
@ilyess For the most part. Every blog post is associated with a Mastodon comment ID and a link to the Mastodon post. Comments and engagements are displayed under the blog post, but the actual interaction takes place on mastodon.
You can see this post as an example: https://readbeanicecream.surge.sh/2025/02/22/integrated-mastodon-comments/
@readbeanicecream That's cool. Thanks for the link.
I saw this strategy deployed on multiple blogs. It does move the discussion away from the blog post, though, and has the disadvantage (or advantage, depending on how you look at it) of requiring a Fediverse account to join the discussion. But it seems to work 🤷
@ilyess It works for me. I don't get much traffic or comments so I don't how it scales. But it is easy.
@readbeanicecream Indeed. Easy to implement and works well, which is part of its charm :)
AMS@ilyess Client-side replies to a linked fediverse post.
@AMS Thank you. How do you deal with moderation?
@ilyess Block the offending commenters. Then their replies don't load from my instance.
@AMS If I understand how client-side pulling of Fediverse replies works, I don't think blocking from your account would remove replies from the list pulled by JS. It just makes them invisible to you. So I suspect they would still show up on your blog post, unless you have a specific way of dealing with this in JS code directly. Is that right?