The comment section on most blogs is pretty minimal, with the real
discussion happening elsewhere, but people who come to the post later
won’t see that discussion. One of the more unusual choices I’ve made
with this blog is that instead of hosting comments here, I pull in and
display comments people make on social media. While this started out
as laziness (who wants to handle accounts for users?) over the years
I’ve come around to thinking that this is how blog comments should
normally work.
The biggest problem with this approach, though, is that it’s in
tension with the goals of the social media companies. Facebook,
Twitter, etc want to keep you on their platform, and aren’t especially
interested in serving as the comment section of external blogs. On the
other hand, this is potentially a really good fit for federated social
media, and I’ve now made it so that ActivityPub replies to my blog
posts will show up as comments here:
Integration was fast: if I fetch
https://[server]/api/v1/statuses/[id]/context" I get all
the publicly visible replies to that status that this server knows
about. Then it’s just a matter of extracting the relevant
information, threading the responses, and fitting that into my
existing comment display infrastructure (code).
This is a bit of a hack on top of Mastodon, but for blogs to
participate directly in ActivityPub, where you could subscribe and
comment over the protocol, you wouldn’t have to implement most of what
Mastodon does. That would make it much smaller, more efficient, and
more maintainable. It looks like maybe someone has made a WordPress plugin
for this? Has anyone tried it?
Mastodon Replies as Comments
Link post
The comment section on most blogs is pretty minimal, with the real discussion happening elsewhere, but people who come to the post later won’t see that discussion. One of the more unusual choices I’ve made with this blog is that instead of hosting comments here, I pull in and display comments people make on social media. While this started out as laziness (who wants to handle accounts for users?) over the years I’ve come around to thinking that this is how blog comments should normally work.
The biggest problem with this approach, though, is that it’s in tension with the goals of the social media companies. Facebook, Twitter, etc want to keep you on their platform, and aren’t especially interested in serving as the comment section of external blogs. On the other hand, this is potentially a really good fit for federated social media, and I’ve now made it so that ActivityPub replies to my blog posts will show up as comments here:
For a live example, here’s a post from last week.
Integration was fast: if I fetch
https://[server]/api/v1/statuses/[id]/context"I get all the publicly visible replies to that status that this server knows about. Then it’s just a matter of extracting the relevant information, threading the responses, and fitting that into my existing comment display infrastructure (code).This is a bit of a hack on top of Mastodon, but for blogs to participate directly in ActivityPub, where you could subscribe and comment over the protocol, you wouldn’t have to implement most of what Mastodon does. That would make it much smaller, more efficient, and more maintainable. It looks like maybe someone has made a WordPress plugin for this? Has anyone tried it?
Comment via: mastodon