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.
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.
I feel the same. Comment sections can be a nice place for further discussion, but so often I find that they derail the bloggers original thought and it's like another article within the article. When you're blogging something informational it might make sense, but personal stuff I'd rather just keep it as my own thought and let others interact further in private if they want.
It can be good as a small community of practice around a resource. It lets people share feedback and ask questions that benefit other readers. This is why I consider reinstating them on my websites.
Note Bluesky is architected to be downstream of PDS (personal data servers) which any user can switch to another provider, and the Bluesky app server acts as an aggregator (but anyone else can build their own aggregators — and people already have). So as Natalie notes in the post, you don’t even “have to” use the Bluesky app API to access the posts. You can get them from a third-party app server (“app view”) or even have your own. They’re all aggregating from the same data source.
> I'm not optimistic about BlueSky's profitability - the current free-at-point of use is a result of VC funding.
You aren't wrong, there will be a turn at some point just like there was with Twitter, but then the same is true of 'AI' and people seem happy to go all-in on that. If VC's want to burn their money on the dream of becoming some new kind of rich... good, let them. Sure it turns sour after a while (Uber, Doordash, etc)... but enjoy the largess before they figure out there's no magic money tree in those hills.
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
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?
To each their own. I prefer the centralized-yet-open approach of bluesky to the artistic chaos of mastodon. I like the idea of mastodon, and it's great for certain kind of people and certain kind of discussion, but I hope you agree that it will never be mass adopted.
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
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, based on Bluesky. Not trivial though, you have to create a lexicon and maintain a DB based on the Bluesky stream.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Readit News
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
[2] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/site.lisp
[3] https://susam.net/comments/
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
You aren't wrong, there will be a turn at some point just like there was with Twitter, but then the same is true of 'AI' and people seem happy to go all-in on that. If VC's want to burn their money on the dream of becoming some new kind of rich... good, let them. Sure it turns sour after a while (Uber, Doordash, etc)... but enjoy the largess before they figure out there's no magic money tree in those hills.
...and you loose access to all your messages and network.
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
Dead Comment
I'm currently building a review system for my open source Web map https://cartes.app, based on Bluesky. Not trivial though, you have to create a lexicon and maintain a DB based on the Bluesky stream.
1 - https://scrapboard.org/
2 - https://docs.bsky.app/docs/api/com-atproto-repo-get-record
Bluesky _will_ enshittify sooner or later
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...
https://brajeshwar.com/2025/can-i-walk-out/
I only see 2 posts on the entire blog, both from 2025 (and one is this post).
BS is an attempt to recreate an even more toxic environment than old Twitter ever was.
Which is all very high school cafeteria-drama.
Seems to me like people who subscribe to a blocklist that I'm on aren't people I want to be visible to/communicate with.
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.