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I'm looking for a new comment system for my #Hugo blog, and I'm not seeing any clearly great options.
I've been using #Commento for #comments on my blog for a few years now, and it's about time to switch comment systems.
Commento has been effectively unmaintained for 4 years (see https://gitlab.com/commento/commento). Their (paid) hosted version has been continuing to work, but I've seen increasing numbers of errors lately, so it's time to move.
I'd really *love* something that could integrate semi-natively with #activitypub so new blog posts could show up in Mastodon and Mastodon replies would show up as comments, *but* I don't want to require a fediverse account for commenters; that rules out most (all?) of the embedded-Mastodon comment options.. After looking through Hugo's somewhat-outdated list of commenting options (https://gohugo.io/content-management/comments/), it looks like #Discourse is the only option that even *slightly* fits that, and it's a lot heavier-weight than I really want to run today. Hours-of-maintenance-per-comment should be less than 1, thanks.
Basic requirements:
- Either easy to self-host or has a cheap hosted option.
- Allows anonymous comments plus common external auth options.
- Possible to import comments from Commento, possibly requiring code on my part, but it needs to allow arbitrary names, etc.
- Works with static sites.
- Not a privacy disaster
- If self-hosted, ideally written in something sane -- Go, Rust, etc. *Ideally* it's a single binary that listens to HTTP and stores comments in Postgres.
- Supports Markdown.
Does anyone have anything that they're really happy with?
@laird have not tried it personally yet but literally just saw this yesterday: https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2025-03/26-meh_another_comment_system
which at quick glance seems to align with what you're looking for
From @splitbrain
@tezoatlipoca @splitbrain Interesting. It's very close, although I'm really not a fan of PHP. Hmm. Thanks!
@laird there are a couple of mentions of using Mastodon as a comment section for static blogs, I think the first ones I remember are from [1] @jwildeboer and [2] @cassidy and maybe from [3] @davidrevoy
[1] https://jan.wildeboer.net/2023/02/Jekyll-Mastodon-Comments/
[2] https://cassidyjames.com/blog/fediverse-blog-comments-mastodon/
@mariusor @jwildeboer @cassidy @davidrevoy my concern with this is that I don't see how it's really possible for people to comment *without* Mastodon then, or how it'd be possible to port previous comments. I don't really want to create semi-bogus Mastodon accounts for people, and I don't want to run two parallel comment systems.
Other than that, though, it looks cool.
@mariusor @jwildeboer @cassidy @davidrevoy there's also the minor issue of wanting a "captive" Mastodon instance for this; pointing it has hachyderm.io (where this account lives) seems less than ideal. All things considered, I'd rather not run my own Mastodon instance if I don't have to.
I kind of looked into GoToSocial (*much* lighter-weight), but by that point it felt like I was further out on the "major project" limb than I really wanted to be.
@mariusor @jwildeboer @cassidy @davidrevoy now I'm wondering if the only real way to do this would be to build a comment server that is fully activitypub-enabled, with local identities for non-fediverse comments. So if someone new comments, then it creates a local account for them (basically just something minimal in a DB), but that provides enough of a hook so that replies from Mastodon (etc) and non-Activitypub users may actually be visible to each other.
Unfortunately, this runs right into the whole "ActivityPub's spec is impossible to understand and doesn't really describe how it's actually used anyway" problem.
@laird I think the library I work on would be good for that. :D #humble_brag
@mariusor Yeah, it was on my list :-). But it'd still require spending some time getting to understand ActivityPub.