Adding Mastodon Comments to Your Blog

F-Droid apps don't have comments or ratings on the default F-Droid app. They're generally less necessary because the apps don't have ads or severe privacy concerns like the ones from Play Store do, but it's still nice to hear others' experiences and comments on them.

G-Droid introduced a commenting system by simply redirecting you to a mastodon URL when you clicked "Add a comment". That URL will by default add "@gdroid@mastodon.technology" and a hashtag based on the app package name to your post. For eg., for the Markor app, it would add

     @gdroid@mastodon.technology #net_gsantner_markor #fdroid_app_comments

Sadly, G-Droid itself doesn't seem to be actively maintained anymore, the last update being a few years old, but it's a really cool example of what is possible when you have open, flexible systems that can be plugged in together in many ways to create the features you need.

I ended up doing something similar, but statically, and searching for discussions dynamically rather than using a single hardcoded thread. Essentially it's a script that searches for recent posts linking to my domain name on Reddit, HN, etc, and then updates a file with the URL of that post and some information about when it was made and how many posts there are. Then there's a Hugo template that converts the data in this file to HTML.

The script runs every few hours using free GitHub runner time, and if it makes a change, it commits it and creates a pull request with the contents so that I can review it. (I could automatically commit straight to the main branch but I like having the manual review just in case.)

I couldn't get it to work for Mastodon because there's not really a public search for Mastodon (for all sorts of reasons), although at some point I want to get it working for Bluesky. I did try hooking it up with Twitter for a while, but that required all sorts of API keys and things that I didn't want to deal with so I gave up. You also need API keys for Reddit, but that was easier to get hold of and manage.

I wrote a post about how I implemented it here: https://jonathan-frere.com/posts/adding-discussions/

I’m quite happy with the result. It’s simple, minimal, and fast. It does exactly what I need and no more.

Plus, everything is held for my review before being published, so I don’t have to worry about spam, cross-site scripting, or off-topic comments. It’s been a satisfying solution.

[1] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/form.lisp

There's a rather long list of other solutions over at https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/

And there's https://github.com/carlitoplatanito/disgus for adding Nostr based comments to your static blog.

What works best for me is to add a link to the fediverse, linkedin and sometimes HN threads of comments when I publish a post. It's also a very low tech solution :)

https://ergaster.org/posts/2024/03/06-welcoming-feedback/

Anyone else weighed up the two approaches, I'm still on the fence tbh.

It's pretty easy to do. I recommend it, if you already use Fedi for anything.

https://micro.blog has a good implementation of this for both the Fediverse and Bluesky. A random example of mine that has an array of 'em if you want an example: https://zacwe.st/2025/02/12/amazon-is-removing-the-ability.h...

https://jszym.com/blog/mastodon_blog_comments/

Mastodon is great, but the "pick a server" step is a pretty hard filter for most users, who just want to sign up for something.

You'd also get to benefit automatically from Bluesky's blocking/moderation tools.

If I would want comments on my blog I would try to integrate BlueSky and Mastodon comments.

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Jan/adding-fediverse-comme...

https://andreasthinks.me/posts/quarto_comments/open-social.h...

I have tried to get my static site generator (Lektor) to work with Mastodon and generate my Mastodon posts as a blog. I haven't had success yet because Lektor is obsolete and kind of garbage, but Mastodon's API is great.

I really like this solution, though. Just write a blog post and link to it from Mastodon. That solves the problem of Mastodon's text limit and of small hosted instances needing to regularly delete content to stay under their account limit.

As a technical feat and expression of FOSS integration this is cool but I don't know about the utility of it since any actual human being reading these comments will already be reading them on Mastodon. It is definitely better than the cancer that is Disqus though.

I'll literally take ads and tracking over it.