Like many others I've switched from the bird site (which we no longer name) to Mastodon and I'm more and more happy with that decision. It looks like the bird site will quickly deteriorate into a right wing troll echo chamber and I have no interest in participating in that.

Meanwhile I got to revising my blog, including adding Mastodon to the social media icons. As part of that process I thought I would try and get the commenting function working.

Do understand that hardly anyone visits my blogs so this is a technical exercise rather than a serious attempt at self promotion. But if anyone did want to add a comment... well it has been broken for years so they couldn't. The comment system I use relies on Disqus. I poked and prodded it, got it kind of working but not really. But in searching for answers as to why it broke I found a few posts saying Disqus was not a good for for this.

So what should I use instead? Then light dawned. Why not just use a Mastodon thread?

So this is how it works. I post to my blog and I share the post to Mastodon (something I would do anyway). Then, and this is the trick, I get the link to the Mastodon post and add it to the blog post at the end with a 'comment here' link. That's all I need.

I means I have to update the blog post, which is no big deal. I can also choose not to do it for some posts if I want.

And I have a working comment system on my blog. Not only that, I don't have to have a system I don't otherwise go to to check for comments. I also don't have to preview comments or moderate them or de-spam them.

Anyone who wants to comment has to have a Mastodon login, of course. But when I used Disqus they needed a Disqus login, so that's no real change. Except that I suspect more people have a Mastodon login already than a Disqus login, so that's progress.

So let's see if it works. Comment on Mastodon here