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Comment by carlbordum | Hacker News Reader

Shameless plug: My friend and I are building a federated commenting system on top of Matrix if anyone is interested. You control the data, your users choose where they want to be signed up, and the system will not disappear overnight because a company decides to discontinue it. And of course there are no trackers/pixels.

This is a hobby project that we're launching in three weeks. If you are interested, come talk to us on matrix (https://matrix.to/#/#cactus:bordum.dk) or keep an eye on our (for now dummy-) landing page: https://cactus.chat/, https://gitlab.com/cactus-comments

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When I click the cactus.chat link I get an "Ethereum Phishing Detection" message.

> This domain is currently on the MetaMask domain warning list. This means that based on information available to us, MetaMask believes this domain could currently compromise your security and, as an added safety feature, MetaMask has restricted access to the site. To override this, please read the rest of this warning for instructions on how to continue at your own risk.

Can you comment on implementation / challenges of using Matrix for this?

I've been working on a dumb git-like and been needing to add syncing. Being a git-like it could just centralize via SSH, but i had also debated a P2P platform like Matrix or IPFS.

You use case UI-embedded Matrix interaction is especially interesting to me, because some of the UIs i plan for on this git-like are WASM based, Offline enabled PWAs.

Thanks for your work here, super interesting!

Even easier would be using Webmentions.

If someone wants to comment on your blog, they can write their own blog post on their blog and send a webmention. That can get linked at the bottom of your blog post with a text snippet summary.

There's no "API" beyond "curl -i -d source=URL -d target=URL WEBMENTION_ENDPOINT" in the traditional sense. Using microformats markup for better exraction is optional.

The result is a federated system of comments owned and controlled by nobody except the original author. No need to use someone's Matrix server or spin up your own. It also imposes a bit of a barrier to entry (must have your own (micro)blog), but if you don't want any random person to leave a comment that can be a feature.

Services like brid.gy turn Fediverse and Twitter comments into Webmentions as well; I've thought about using it for Fediverse comments in the past, but I don't want to host a new program or rely on a third-party service.

I think using Matrix for this is absolutely the right way to go. Does cactus conform to the threading specification? I was planning on eventually trying this myself, but felt like I should wait until the threading MSC stabilized.

Aforementionend friend and Cactus Comments dev here.

We don't support any sort of threading yet, although Cerulean-style threading is definitely somewhere down the road. Although stuff like redactions and emoji reactions are a higher priority right now.

We're also keeping our eyes out for the upcoming spaces stuff. That might be useful for grouping comment sections.

That's pretty interesting. I will check it out. Thanks for sharing. :D

Hey, I remember your post on the Level1Techs forum about this. Best of luck!

Hey, thanks! It's a small web I guess.

why not activatypub

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