Building Bluesky comments for my blog

https://natalie.sh/posts/bluesky-comments/

by g0xA52A2A • 12 months ago

382 137 12 months ago

ulrischa• 12 months 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• 12 months ago

The outline on the right is nice.

MrPapz• 12 months 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• 12 months ago

Nice. But what about moderation?

aranw3• 12 months ago

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

jszymborski• 12 months 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

aranw3• 12 months ago

Even better, only show comments that your account has favourited.

Yeah I like this solution. Might try explore this approach

archagon2• 12 months 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• 12 months 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• 12 months 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

isodev3• 12 months 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• 12 months ago

yooooo nat

OneDeuxTriSeiGo11• 12 months ago

I saw the post and was like eyyyyyy that's oomf.

hk1337• 12 months 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.

toomuchtodo3• 12 months 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

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• 12 months ago

Well, github has 225 million users, so bluesky needs to catch up.

trothamel• 12 months ago

38M is the number of accounts registered. It seems like the number of users is lower and falling.

ecshafer• 12 months ago

Bluesky is already dying and has 38M registered users to Githubs 225M users. Github is growing, and Bluesky isn't. By your own suggestion, they should have used Github.

nonethewiser3• 12 months ago

Github has a lot more than 38M users so I'm not sure what point you are making with that figure

dwedge• 12 months ago

I don't know a single person outside of tech who has a bluesky account. I know very few people in tech who do.

Vaslo• 12 months ago

The puck is not going to bluesky. Ads are back on X. Many who claim to have left have returned. Bluesky is the far leftist version of gab, no matter how you don’t like people saying that.

I’m among that 31M who signed up (as are many of my friends) and only the most left ones are still using it. I trolled for a couple of days until it got boring.

skrtskrt• 12 months ago

You can host your own Bluesky instance and federate across instances, with all the data you host stored in an open an portable format, can you do the same with GitHub?

alemanek• 12 months ago

It’s coming in gitea: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/20311

I would be willing to guess that self hosting gitea as a backup mirror is less work than doing the same for Bluesky. But, just speculating

kdrvr• 12 months ago

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

toomuchtodo3• 12 months ago

"Protocols, not platforms." As the kids say, "build mode" but building what can't be captured, enshittified, etc.

UtopiaPunk2• 12 months 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.

sugarpimpdorsey2• 12 months 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.

TimorousBestie3• 12 months 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.

freshchilled• 12 months ago

Or even worse, your account made it onto some pre-shared blacklist so you'll be invisible before you say a word.

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.

isodev3• 12 months ago

Well no, it’s basically a Threads with slightly more open integration options. You probably mean ATProto, perhaps.

philipwhiuk• 12 months 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.

PaulHoule3• 12 months ago

I really believe in

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

ujkhsjkdhf234• 12 months ago

I think BlueSky should lean into this and operate as a domain registrar like Squarespace does.

spartanatreyu• 12 months 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?

danabramov3• 12 months ago

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.

fsflover3• 12 months ago

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yoursel...

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

EA-3167• 12 months ago

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.

fsflover3• 12 months ago

but enjoy the largess before they figure out there's no magic money tree

...and you loose access to all your messages and network.

mvieira38• 12 months ago

Bluesky is just enshittified Mastodon. It advertises federation while making it extremely impractical to use

integralid2• 12 months ago

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.

oellegaard• 12 months 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• 12 months ago

To be clear, so is blue sky – you can run a Bluesky server yourself just like mastodon

dewey2• 12 months ago

Do you know anyone who does? There's many big and open Mastodon instances but I've yet to see a Bluesky one.

nileshtrivedi2• 12 months ago

Not only is the bluesky network highly centralized right now, its UI is designed to perpetually lock users into the main bluesky server. Even if you use your own identity, when sharing the URLs to the posts via the UI, the URL defaults to bsky dot app domain, which will break if the author ever moves to a second server.

nonethewiser3• 12 months 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.

PaulHoule3• 12 months 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• 12 months ago

It's not really hijacking in this case, Bluesky is built for this on purpose.

ThinkBeat• 12 months 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?

tracker12• 12 months 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.

LeoPanthera2• 12 months 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.

TimorousBestie3• 12 months 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.

cactacea2• 12 months ago

[flagged]

OneDeuxTriSeiGo11• 12 months ago

This is a claim that's going to require support. Bluesky's moderation service (just adds metadata/labels to posts/accounts) is all client side opt-in. It's force-enabled by the default client but any third party client allows you to opt-out (or doesn't even use it by default).

And PDS level/"account" bans are just at the PDS. If you've been "banned", that's just bluesky the PDS host telling you they don't want to host you and that you need to go host your data yourself or find someone else to host it for you. i.e. find another PDS.

Basically every form of ban or moderation in atproto/bluesky is "soft" moderation and you can fairly trivially bypass it and continue doing your own thing.

The overwhelming majority of right wing accounts that get banned do so soon after joining (and generally after going to pick fights). And they never even bother to try to keep their accounts, instead choosing to create new accounts to get banned again or abandon the platform. It's disingenuous behavior and for right wing personalities it feels almost more like a sticker of pride that they were "banned from bluesky".

Plenty of right leaning and libertarian accounts exist on bluesky. Project Liberal [1] and Liberal Party USA [2] (run by Josh Eakle[3] and Kevin Gaughen[4] respectively) exist just fine on bluesky and they are large splinter groups from the Libertarian Party following the whole Mises Caucus coup attempt thing. Likewise a number of libertarian groups such as the Libertarian Party of Lousiana [5] do just fine on bluesky. And of course AI and Cryptocurrency people also do just fine on bluesky as well despite the stereotypes against them and the common belief that "they aren't welcome on bluesky". The worst thing that happens is people block or mute you and you don't have to deal with them anymore rather than toxicly fighting each other each time you see each other.

TLDR: Everyone is welcome on bluesky but there's no requirement for people to tolerate you. Even if you violate every transgression, as long as you aren't posting literal child porn to the network you'll still be able to exist just fine however people might just ignore you.

------------

1. Project Liberal: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:d5nigw7kzpsglf3gtl2dvbev

2. Liberal Party USA: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:v3jmda7lwwdoofcvgmjwsbcg

3. Josh Eakle: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2adtngm3y6e6ol6jastnkxzm

4. Kevin Gaughen: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4oyecf2hz4ajhm4zqp52hxqo

5. LP of Lousiana: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:mongiv55fh5l5e7vi7cbjajw

const_cast• 12 months ago

The problem with the mentality is that conservative ideas aren't ever censored, even on mainstream platforms like Instagram.

Rather, there is an association between modern conservative/libertarian voices and populist messaging - and all the pitfalls that come with it. Meaning, vulgarity, emotional bait, deception, and purposefully offensive language.

Like, the modern American conservative leadership cannot advertise their own ideology without resorting to lies and attacks of character. The left, by comparison, does not operate that way.

So, if you're censoring shitheads who are generally unliked, that might appear as though youre targeting conservatives or right leaning people. But you're not.

Basically, the right has purposefully positioned themselves to be associated with unpalatable ideas in order to leverage populist messaging. And this worked - they won an election. The downside is that now if you filter out unpalatable ideas such as blatant slurs you're going to necessarily mostly target right wing people. By accident.

psionides• 12 months ago

That's funny, because the team is also regularly accused of being "libertarian tech bros"

toomuchtodo3• 12 months ago

If interested in understanding this topic in detail, https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net has information on running your own relay network, migrating data, etc as it relates to Bluesky and AT Proto. Work continues to enable data migration, portability, alternate relay networks, etc. https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t is particularly relevant.

(blog author works at bluesky, no affiliation personally)

OneDeuxTriSeiGo11• 12 months ago

So. You can back up your personal data to what is effectively a fancy tar ball (technically it's a collection of CAR files akin to what IPFS uses) and you can restore that to any PDS (personal data server) when you point your account there (either via your did:plc doc or via DNS records via did:web). So even if your current PDS implodes or bans you, you can just go somewhere else.

And of course there are several implementations and hosts for relays (the gossip nodes), PDS implementations, clients, and appviews (the server backend for bluesky the web app).

So strictly speaking if bluesky imploded tomorrow you could just use a self hosted version of the same app or use someone else's (such as https://zeppelin.social).

The PLC directory is still technically in bluesky's hands but is being transferred an independent foundation atm and could be trivially forked if needed. And of course if you use did:web that doesn't apply to you and you just depend on DNS.

chodlog• 12 months ago

But that's just your own posts isn't it? Wouldn't the replies from others, which would end up as comments on this author's blog, be in other users' CAR archives in each of their PDSes?

nonethewiser3• 12 months 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• 12 months ago

They had another blog as per archive.org

UtopiaPunk2• 12 months ago

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

notsahil• 12 months ago

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

xd1936• 12 months ago

See also: Toot toot! Mastodon-powered Blog Comments [2023]

https://cassidyjames.com/blog/fediverse-blog-comments-mastod...

susam• 12 months 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

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

[3] https://susam.net/comments/

mighmi• 12 months ago

Taking comments via a (n email) form, which you then manually add under the article's html/markdown is nice.

justusthane• 12 months ago

That's what I do, except I skip the form and just provide my email address at the bottom of each post.

AndrewStephens• 12 months 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.

famahar• 12 months ago

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.

nicbou• 12 months ago

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.

zem• 12 months ago

kind of like "letters to the editor" in newspapers (:

maelito4• 12 months 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, based on Bluesky. Not trivial though, you have to create a lexicon and maintain a DB based on the Bluesky stream.

dom96• 12 months 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/

2 - https://docs.bsky.app/docs/api/com-atproto-repo-get-record

pietervdvn2• 12 months 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

maelito4• 12 months 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...

FreeTrade2• 12 months ago

Could you say more about what you're building? I didn't quite understand from your comment or the website.

axelpacheco• 12 months ago

Composable internet will win over end to end closed systems

tomgag2• 12 months ago

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

lucius_verus• 12 months ago

People have been doing this with ActivityPub/Mastodon for years: https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta...

tomgag2• 12 months ago

That's cool, didn't know that!

uxjw• 12 months ago

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

jslakro• 12 months ago

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

zhivota• 12 months 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• 12 months 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• 12 months ago

I would recommend 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.

isodev3• 12 months 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• 12 months 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• 12 months 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/

Unit327• 12 months ago

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/

winrid• 12 months 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• 12 months ago

If you're on Quarto, I have a plugin that does this (with fediverse support)

https://github.com/AndreasThinks/quarto-open-social-comments

0x445442• 12 months 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.

integralid2• 12 months 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• 12 months ago

More people have HN accounts than bluesky accounts

You really think that?

Building Bluesky comments for my blog

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