flypig.co.uk

For the last 13 years I've been using Disqus to add comment support to my website. I was never very satisfied with this; it had many drawbacks:

1. The client-side JavaScript meant it didn't properly allow for progressive enhancement.
2. Being beholden to an external service made me uncomfortable.
3. Disqus has a dubious privacy record, including having violated the GDPR.
4. Embedding Disqus code introduced trackers onto the site.

I did my best to work around the last of these by dynamically loading the Disqus code only when the user actively selects to view the comments. I wrote about this back in April 2020 as part of a description of how to build a privacy-respecting websites. But it remained a suboptimal arrangement.

So I was really pleased when my erstwhile colleague Bastian Greshake Tzovaras wrote about how he's added a Fediverse feed as a comment section for his blog. Bastian was building on the work of Robert W. Gehl, who was himself building on the ideas of Carl Schwan.

And so it is that I now also have the option use Mastodon for comments.

The original usecase for this was for static sites where this approach makes perfect sense. My site's not static, but I've thought long and hard about comments over the years and have never been able to come up with a solution that I'm fully happy with.

Using Mastodon doesn't address all of the issues I described above in relation to Disqus: it's still relying on an external service and is still all performed client-side using JavaScript. At least now when JavaScript is disabled there's a link that goes straight to the conversation on Mastodon. So there is at least some sort of fallback.

This feels like the best option yet given that there's no user tracking involved. My thanks to everyone involved in coming up with and refined this nice solution.