Interesting article! I always enjoy reading how people build and maintain their independent personal websites. The post begins with the Comment System Problem and presents four alternatives but I think I have a fifth alternative, which has worked incredibly well for me.
After spending way too much time fiddling with third-party comment systems, I ended up rolling my own in Common Lisp [1]. It is pretty barebones though. It does exactly what I need, and nothing more.
Every comment posted gets written to a file for manual review, so I don't have to worry about spam, cross-site scripting, etc. I usually go through them on weekends and add them to my blog. The comments themselves are saved in plain HTML files, and my static site generator, which is also written in Common Lisp [2], generates the static website along with the comments [3]. So in a way, the static website generator is also a static comment pages generator!
Now this solution doesn't satisfy the first four attributes (no infra, rich content, real identity, etc.) in the second section of the article. So clearly my solution is going to be inadequate for the author of this post. But this works very well for me. I've been using this setup for at least four years now (possibly much longer, since my old PHP-based site did more or less the same thing), and it's worked well for me.
>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 · 15m ago
They had another blog as per archive.org
ThinkBeat · 1h 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?
toomuchtodo · 37m 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)
OneDeuxTriSeiGo · 31m 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 · 21m 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?
tracker1 · 1h 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.
TimorousBestie · 45m 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.
OneDeuxTriSeiGo · 11m 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.
Please don't break the site guidelines like this, no matter how incorrect another comment is or you feel it is.
Doing this has the obvious downside of making the threads more toxic, plus the less obvious one of discrediting the truth (assuming your comment is indeed correct) by giving it toxic associations. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
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.
ulrischa · 2h 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
philipwhiuk · 1h 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.
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
> Even better, only show comments that your account has favourited.
Yeah I like this solution. Might try explore this approach
_hyn3 · 1h ago
How is this different from any other self hosted solution; you've still got to manage spam yourself. Might as well go self hosted.
eat_veggies · 1h ago
Spam isn't the only challenge of going self-hosted and it's cool to tie into an existing ecosystem for identity. Also it's pretty neat that people can engage outside of your website while you still get to pick what gets surfaced on your own website.
aranw · 1h ago
I have a static site. Self hosted would mean I’d need a database and I think right now I want to keep the static generation. Happy to try self hosted in future and write my own solution but right now I got plenty of side projects
jameshart · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
Feels like Bluesky is single-handedly making the Internet an open for new ideas again
UtopiaPunk · 1h 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.
toomuchtodo · 1h ago
"Protocols, not platforms." As the kids say, "build mode" but building what can't be captured, enshittified, etc.
sugarpimpdorsey · 55m 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.
freshchilled · 34m 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.
TimorousBestie · 40m 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.
nonethewiser · 1h 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.
PaulHoule · 11m 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.
xd1936 · 34m ago
See also: Toot toot! Mastodon-powered Blog Comments [2023]
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.
toomuchtodo · 1h 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.
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)
trothamel · 1h ago
38M is the number of accounts registered. It seems like the number of users is lower and falling.
dwedge · 1h 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.
zufallsheld · 1h ago
Well, github has 225 million users, so bluesky needs to catch up.
nonethewiser · 1h ago
Github has a lot more than 38M users so I'm not sure what point you are making with that figure
No comments yet
ecshafer · 1h 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.
skrtskrt · 1h 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?
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
oellegaard · 1h 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 · 1h ago
To be clear, so is blue sky – you can run a Bluesky server yourself just like mastodon
nileshtrivedi · 49m 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.
dewey · 1h ago
Do you know anyone who does? There's many big and open Mastodon instances but I've yet to see a Bluesky one.
mmattbtw · 1h ago
yooooo nat
artursapek · 1h ago
My only problem with Bluesky is the communists and censorship
UtopiaPunk · 1h ago
laughs communistly
PaulHoule · 12m ago
One of the many reasons I can't get a security clearance was that I received an invitation on red paper to go to a Christmas party put on by this organization
so I did and got photographed with weird Soviet cameras and shook hands with Gus Hall who was dressed up as Santa Claus and saying "Ho Ho Ho!"
(My wife and I were so antinomian that our hippie outfits got us described as "the strangest people in NYC" in front of the Fox News headquarters, which wasn't hard to do in the conformist 1990s, then we took the bus to Manchester, NH, arrived at 4am and figured there was no reason not to walk out to the suburbs and shocked my mom when we knocked on the door around 7am)
After spending way too much time fiddling with third-party comment systems, I ended up rolling my own in Common Lisp [1]. It is pretty barebones though. It does exactly what I need, and nothing more.
Every comment posted gets written to a file for manual review, so I don't have to worry about spam, cross-site scripting, etc. I usually go through them on weekends and add them to my blog. The comments themselves are saved in plain HTML files, and my static site generator, which is also written in Common Lisp [2], generates the static website along with the comments [3]. So in a way, the static website generator is also a static comment pages generator!
Now this solution doesn't satisfy the first four attributes (no infra, rich content, real identity, etc.) in the second section of the article. So clearly my solution is going to be inadequate for the author of this post. But this works very well for me. I've been using this setup for at least four years now (possibly much longer, since my old PHP-based site did more or less the same thing), and it's worked well for me.
[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/
I only see 2 posts on the entire blog, both from 2025 (and one is this post).
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?
(blog author works at bluesky, no affiliation personally)
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.
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
Please don't break the site guidelines like this, no matter how incorrect another comment is or you feel it is.
Doing this has the obvious downside of making the threads more toxic, plus the less obvious one of discrediting the truth (assuming your comment is indeed correct) by giving it toxic associations. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
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.
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
- 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
Yeah I like this solution. Might try explore this approach
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.
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
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.
Always looking for new places.
https://cassidyjames.com/blog/fediverse-blog-comments-mastod...
I mean it’s fine, use whatever your comfortable with and Bluesky is the next frontier for development ideas.
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)
No comments yet
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_USA
so I did and got photographed with weird Soviet cameras and shook hands with Gus Hall who was dressed up as Santa Claus and saying "Ho Ho Ho!"
(My wife and I were so antinomian that our hippie outfits got us described as "the strangest people in NYC" in front of the Fox News headquarters, which wasn't hard to do in the conformist 1990s, then we took the bus to Manchester, NH, arrived at 4am and figured there was no reason not to walk out to the suburbs and shocked my mom when we knocked on the door around 7am)