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Comment by coffeecheque | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like a job for Hugo, GitHub and Netlify.

Simple. Easy. Free.

You can even set up a form and get comments into your email. (Then just manually copy/paste into the markdown and commit it again and force a rebuild).

I use that setup and I love it.

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> just manually

I would find this tedious for any number of comments. Is there a better way?

I’ve thought about writing a AWS Lambda that you POST the comment form to which then adds a file to the git repo that then Hugo can grab when Netlify is building the site, but that seems rather complex and I think it’d take me a lot more time than just doing it manually.

But I haven’t found a good, lightweight, privacy focussed way to solve this yet.

I'm also interested in this (although not AWS): what would be interesting would be a protocol-first approach where we can come up with several interoperable implementations. i personally would go with a simple PHP script, but i can see reasons for which someone would use another tech that's closer to the rest of their stack.

Don't host comments. The day when comments tended to have any value on the web passed ages ago. No one blogs anymore, and no one reads blogs anymore, so most of the traffic you get is just going to be bots or cancerous trolls anyway - if you're lucky enough to get any actual human readers at all in the latter case.

Or use a hosted service like Disqus or an alternative if you want comments, but the better solution is not to bother.

As someone who has a public email written on their blog, i've found the signal/noise ratio in the emails i reply to be very good. Of course, if you have a public HTTP form you're gonna have more SPAM, but most SPAM is fully automated and will not pass a simple "what's 2 + 2" CAPTCHA.

If you need better vetting, consider using webmention/ActivityPub federation and allowlisting individual hosts for automatic approval. There is definitely spam on such protocols too, but they tend to come from the same domain/IP so denylisting is very efficient in dealing with it.

Can't help thinking of the Yogi Berra quote (whether he said it or not), "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

Seems like there are a lot of folks interested in blogging support, considering that nobody reads blogs anymore.

Netlify has a Forms functionality, that can be used to trigger serverless functions, I was thinking it'd be possible to add the comment to a file, git push it and trigger a rebuild. Hah, rebuilding a whole site on every submitted comment seems like overkill though...

https://docs.netlify.com/forms/submissions/#form-triggered-f...

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