One of the choices I had to make when creating this blog relates to comment management: this isn’t the first time I’ve started a blog, and managing comments has always been the least interesting part. It’s not that I don’t care about feedback, but I’ve always found the moderation aspect rather boring and complex.
Reading Joel’s blog (which as you can see inspired my color scheme and fonts), I was struck by how he decided to handle comments through the Fediverse. I don’t want to spend hours explaining what the Fediverse is (I’ll leave you to Elena‘s excellent explanation here), but essentially the idea is to cross-post on Mastodon and let users comment there.
From my perspective, the pros are many. First of all, it forces me to use Mastodon: it’s a platform I’ve been following for a long time but never thought of using seriously (just like I never seriously used X/Twitter). Then it avoids the need for people to register either on my blog or with an external comment service to post on my blog (I used Disqus in the past). Finally, the mechanism is totally automatic and through this plugin I can simply publish posts on Mastodon and then create an automatic link at the end of my posts to redirect to Mastodon for comments (in the plugin documentation you’ll find the snippet to put in your WordPress functions.php file to do this).
So what can I say – I’ll be waiting for you in the comments on my posts, on Gianx on Mastodon!