So, for the last few months, I’ve used Hyvor for the comments on this blog. This was after trying a few times to get it right with free and open source options. I like Hyvor a lot, but it has one HUGE problem: it’s expensive. And I’m not talking like 30 bucks a year, it’s 140 bucks a year. That’s absurd for a blog commenting system, at least for a small blog that only a handful of people will ever even want to comment on.

So, I’ve been thinking about how I’d go about making this situation better. I knew that Carl Schawn had developed a way to use Mastodon/Fediverse comments on his blog, but I had failed to get that working back before I switched to Hyvor. I failed, mostly because I was using GoToSocial, which is like Mastodon, but not quite the same.

Recently, I’ve been trying (and mostly failing) to remove some of the subscriptions from my life, so I wanted to find a way to get rid of Hyvor. I love the Fediverse, so I figured I’d give these comments another try.

I managed to get it all working, even with my GoToSocial account. I had to supplement Carl’s code with an always on docker-based proxy that authenticated the comments from GTS because they do not allow for truly public API access. I got the comments to display, but GTS has a really bad UI. I knew this, but I figured it would be okay.

The problem isn’t the look of the UI but that it has no interactability. You can’t reply to a post when you find it. With Mastodon, you can. Sure you have to sign in, but that’s expected. GTS doesn’t offer that functionality at all. So if someone were to visit this post and want to reply to it, they could click “Reply on the Fediverse,” and then they’d be stuck unless they went to their own instance, found the toot about this post, and replied there.

My solution ended up being to go back to Fosstodon. I really liked the Polymaths instance. Amin is a great guy and runs an awesome community, but he can’t help that GTS’s UI is subpar. So I moved, and now comments are working the way I want them to work.

I still have some styling things to work out, and I want to perhaps make threads collapseable, but other than that, I’m super happy with the way this turned out. The lack of anonymous commenting is an issue, but anyone who wants to not be public can just email me instead. So go on, leave a comment below by replying on the Fediverse. Might as well test it out to see how well I did.