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Comment by vlmutolo | Hacker News Reader

Wow, it would be really, really interesting for a blog to offer a Matrix room as a "comment section". If you didn't care about threading, you could probably do something like that even today.

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https://matrix.org/blog/2020/09/15/gsoc-report-html-embeddab... was a GSOC project this year which heads in that direction. Meanwhile Hydrogen has been built to be embeddable (https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web). And Gitter of course has http://sidecar.gitter.im/.

But nobody has fully packaged one up as FOSS Disqus/Intercom/etc alt yet. It's a huge and easily-fillable gap in the Matrix ecosystem :)

We've been working on some Web Components that use the js sdk to talk with matrix but have been wondering if we should spend time looking at how the react sdk could be implemented in this use case assuming it would better handle encryption etc... although I think I read recently that the js sdk also handles encryption - but we'd need to add UI for verification to access encrypted rooms which seems likely to be a pain across browser sessions... there's also an issue as to which websites you might trust to share your matrix user token with to post on your behalf (but will check out Hydrogen to see how it handles this).

So thinking out loud, for a disqus clone - sticking to unencrypted rooms and web components could be the way to go! Thanks for the GSOC and Hydrogen links - will check them out!

That can definitely be done today: just point a link to a public matrix room...well, the participants would need an account associated to a homeserver first in order to interact...but that's no different - conceptually - than needing to have a disqus account. The benefit of course is that their account can be associated to their __own__ homeserver! In fact, i do this already on my website; though for general contact (like a poorman's contact form), rather than a comment section for blog posts - but the approach works for either perspective.

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