Hey hey, I have a static hugo web site online, for me personally, on a free netlify account. It’s extremely low traffic and currently the only way to interact with me via that site is to submit a contact form.
I am considering my options for making the site more interactive. I am concerned about the cost mostly - I have no budget or maybe could spend a very small amount - and the privacy of the data people might provide.
I’ve done some searching and see the options out there – disqus has no privacy, commentbox.io seems OK – but I am curious how you all solve this / what you recommend for someone with my very low-end requirements. Thanks for sharing what works for you.
If you want to make your site more interactive but not necessarily with comments, look at the Open Heart protocol.
It’s a cool implementation where people can literally hit like on your writings whether they’re reading your site in the browser or within their RSS feed readers.
Oh I like that! Thanks for the idea.
If you want to keep it fedi related there are apparently ways to implement mastodon as comments
There’s ways to integrate Mastodon comments, if that’s up your alley. I don’t know the technical details, but basically a Mastodon post linking to your blog post would show up on the Fediverse and when people respond to that post using the “public” privacy setting, then that post will show up on your website.
If you tagged a Lemmy community in that Mastodon post, it should also federate over here, although I’m not sure, if responses will also show up.
Unsurprisingly, there’s a gazillion blog posts out there on how to set this up, but here’s just a couple:
- https://berglyd.net/blog/2023/03/mastodon-comments/
- https://andreas.scherbaum.la/post/2024-05-23_client-side-comments-with-mastodon-on-a-static-hugo-website/
- https://lauralisscott.com/blog/mastodon-comments-hugo-static-site/
And of course, if you scroll down to the bottom of those pages, you can see how the integration looks like.
From what I’ve seen when quickly scanning the posts, I believe, they’re using different plugins to do this. The first link I posted discusses a plugin developed by Carl Schwan, who’s also a KDE dev and he’s here on Lemmy, too, so that would be what I’d personally try, without knowing anything else about these plugins. 🙃
Derek Sivers has a very simple and direct implementation for static comments.
There’s always Disqus. But here are a few more alternatives:
If you move to free hosting on github pages, you could also use Github discussions: https://github.com/features/discussions