My blog now has Lemmy comments

submitted by morrowind

blog.coship.fyi/blog/lemmy-comments/

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71 Comments

ProdigalFrog

Ooh, that's nice. I could see that effectively replacing disqus comments below articles. Cool beans!

Lost_My_Mind , edited

Wait, so theoretically, you could create a blog, and create a Lemmy instance/community, post a blog entry, have it auto post the blog entry to your instance, and now the Lemmy comments for the Lemmy post are the comments on the blog post? Do I have that right?

And in theory THIS comment should show up on your blog, yes?

Edit: Hey, I see it!

morrowind [OP]

Oh much simpler, I just make a post with my blog as a link, and supply that link to my site and it shows the comments from that link. As I said, not actually federated. It's basically a sort of frontend.

Lost_My_Mind

Could you make a community, and a bot? The bot would look for any post on your blog, then the bot creates a post in that community that uses the blog post title as the lemmy title, and uses the blog body as the post body.

Then the bot tells your blog the url of the lemmy post to use the lemmy comments.

Then, I see the button that says "load lemmy comments". Maybe your bot also creates a mastodon using the title of the blog post as a link to the blog post. Then any mastodon replies to that mastodon post could be under a different button that just says "Load Mastodon replies".

So at the end of your blog you have "Load Lemmy comments" (just as we see here) but next to it is "Load Mastodon replies".

And all of this, is done by you just posting once to the blog, while the bots do everything else in an instant.

You just post once on the blog, and automatically a Lemmy post is created which is a duplicate of the blog post, the lemmy comments are loaded via a button on the blog automatically, a Mastodon post is created which is just a link to the blog using that posts title as the clickable link, AND a button on the blog is created to see Mastodon replies to the mastodon post.

Everything besides the innitial blog post is automatic.

Is that possible?

morrowind [OP]

Possible sure, but aside from the effort to make such a bot, posting to my own community would mean that very few people would see it, aside from those who already follow the blog. I have to pick a lemmy community, at which point I may as well do the rest of the work too. Now maybe I could have an llm analyze my post, fetch a list of communities, and then pick a likely one, but honestly this is getting too complicated

Lost_My_Mind

Oh, I figure you make your own community. The Mastodon account grows your blogs awareness. The Lemmy community serves as a place to discuss your blog while also being host to the majority of the conversation. And the blog is the host of the content.

Rogue

Doesn't Lemmy support cross posting?

I considered implementing Lemmy comments and theorised I'd post to my own community/instance so I had full moderation control, then cross post that to all the relevant communities.

LibertyLizard , edited

Kinda cool. To be honest I’m mostly posting this to test it.

Edit: It works!

Voyajer

How about image support?

morrowind [OP]

Not at the moment, since that would require parsing the markdown

m_f , edited

Neat! Do you pick one instance to load comments from? I notice that this comment isn't showing up immediately, so wondering if there's federation delay or the like.

morrowind [OP]

Currently uses my home instance, lemmy.ml. I'd expect there to be some delay

felsiq

I’m a little bit biased here but it might be a good idea to use an instance like lemmy.zip instead, to minimize the amount of defederation going on.

Otter

I wonder what happens if a comment is deleted

Andrew

Neat. It took me a while to realise what was going on: the post on Lemmy and the blogpost are two separate entities. The Lemmy post is a link to the blogpost, and the blogpost uses the post_id to fetch the comments (so I guess this means you have to make the blogpost, make the Lemmy post, and then go back and edit the blogpost with the correct id?)

The script is inspectable on the blog - I can see it does:
const url = 'https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/comment/listpost_id=21617067&limit=100&max_depth=8&sort=Top&type_=All';

So I suppose there's an inbuilt limit for comment depth and number of replies, but if you start down the road of working on that, you'll eventually find that you've re-invented a front-end, and there's no end to it.

What the duckquill guys are doing is a bit fudgy, in that they're getting another website to do the federation legwork for them, but the results are pleasing enough.

morrowind [OP]

Lol, don't blame the duckquill dev, he only wrote the mastodon one, which I don't use. This is all me.

So I suppose there’s an inbuilt limit for comment depth and number of replies, but if you start down the road of working on that, you’ll eventually find that you’ve re-invented a front-end, and there’s no end to it.

Yeah, I kinda chose the limits arbitrarily, but I don't expect them to be an issue anytime soon.

This setup is also more flexible. I can in the future add comments from multiple lemmy posts, as well as other completely different sites.

cron

It seems like a tedious workflow, but the end result is quite good.

Dragon

It would be nice if you could sign-in/comment directly from the blog. But I'm guessing the Lemmy api doesn't provide that without making the blog it's own instance

woelkchen , edited

It could be a web app like Voyager but you really shouldn't just enter your credential willy nilly all over the place.

Dragon

Theoretically Lemmy could open a pop-up or redirect to sign in through your instance.

Flax

Would be cool if something like this existed for WordPress

imattau
@morrowind Test comment from outside of Lemmy
morrowind [OP]

Nice! That works too

Blaze

Great!

qprimed

peachy keen, friend. peachy keen.

morrowind [OP]

Alright, let's see if this shows

qprimed

it be there! ;-)

awesome job!

morrowind [OP] , edited

Lets gooo ╰(*°▽°*)╯╰(*°▽°*)╯

Antithetical

Nice, I did the same for my blog. Didn't want to build a whole comment system when Lemmy fits the bill quite nicely :)

morrowind [OP]

Drop a link! I'd like to see it

Antithetical , edited

Ha sure, although since it is not well traveled there aren't any Lemmy comments yet. But you're very welcome to visit..

See: Gele Sneeuw

TORFdot0

I did the same using Mastodon for my blog, ended up switching to Disqus (*shudders*) just because it supports more SSO options for accounts that my limited readership is likely to have

R00bot

History in the making. This is what open source is all about.

Fuck Yankies

Immediately scrolls down to the comment section. I've been spoiled by content just automatically loading, but I saw the "Load Lemmy" button. Tres chic.

It would be cool if there was a raised question mark button to the right for the load button, that on mouse over or click shows a tooltip explaining shortly what Lemmy is, as well as directly telling the user what community and instance the comments hail from - even before loading the content.

A standard tooltip for that purpose would be kind of nice.

morrowind [OP]

Yeah I could add that.

as well as directly telling the user what community and instance the comments hail from - even before loading the content.

Well I'd have to load something to show this, unless I set it manually, which would be cumbersome.

Fuck Yankies

Yeah, I'm not saying it's easy to do ^^ it is a job and a half just to design it, for sure. I'm not facetious enough to pretend anything else.

xavier666

This is a test comment to check the functionality.

WereCat

This is a test reply to test the functionality of the test comment.

xavier666 , edited

This reply is for informing you that both your and my comments are visible on the blog. Also, i'm posting from lemm.ee and the user is from .ml. So cross-instance comments are also working.

Good job @morrowind@lemmy.ml

ByteOnBikes

Sweet! This is really cool and inspired me to try something.

daudix

Awsum!

morrowind [OP]

Hey aren't you the duckquill dev?

daudix

Mhm :)

cron

Interesting. What is tge reasoning behind only fetching the comments vs. a full fediverse integration?

morrowind [OP]

Fediverse integration would require me to run, pay for and maintain a federated server. This takes me 50 lines of Javascript on a completely static site that cloudflare runs for free. It's just so much easier

vaguerant

Super neat concept. I really enjoy the melding of (micro)blogs and threads, which is what I like about Kbin/Mbin; I can follow interesting people from Mastodon without needing to visit a separate app or site. In a way, this scratches that same itch for Lemmy.

mesamune

Neat!

unrushed233

Does it also work with Mastodon? Because it is possible to reply to Lemmy posts from Mastodon, right?

morrowind [OP]

It works with anything lemmy works with, so yes

unrushed233

That's awesome

midnightblue

It appears to. I just copy-pasted the link into Mastodon and it loaded this post with all the comments. Discovery for Lemmy posts on Mastodon still sucks though.

Devdoggy

I just wanted to say 2 things, 1) Very cool! 2)Nice username.

Fizz

This is really cool. Can you add more detail on how to set this up to the blogpost?

morrowind [OP]

I was, but honestly there's not much to write without getting into the specifics of parsing the lemmy api, because it's literally just a fetchcall and then turning the response into nice html

Gemini24601

What an awesome implementation for Lemmy!

dekuuSkrb

naawww this is tuff

puppycat

this is actually really cool! I also wanna suggest using any instance besides .ml or .world, just for the sake of why Lemmy exists in the first place

morrowind [OP]

I get the idea, but it's my home instance, so it'd be kinda weird for me to use a different one. Also would add an extra step

moseschrute

In new to lemmy. Curious what the significance of ml and world are? Do you mean those TLDs or just lemmy.ml and lemmy.world specifically

FiskFisk33

the latter, they are the largest instances, and it's generally healthy to spread stuff out

puppycat

just those two specifically, the more everything uses those two instances the more power they have basically. the whole point of being federated is to avoid being idk ruled over by any people, groups, or greedy little pig boys.

XNX

Thats Awesome! Needs a mobile ui though

morrowind [OP]

It should work on mobile. What problem are you seeing?

morrowind [OP]

Update: I think I see the problem, comments are too wide on small screens. I'll see if I can fix it

ns1

Nice work!

Duckquill sounds like cold medicine specifically formulated for ducks.

TriflingToad

Hello webcrawlers! 🕷️🕷️

chirospasm

I am so digging this!

299792458ms

This is DOPE!

secret300

Very neat

Derin

This is a pretty interesting idea! And I do agree that the feature to aggregate comments from multiple posts would be useful.