I joined Bluesky in September 2023. I didn't post anything there, since I was using X mainly. Although it looked like a copy of Twitter, it felt refreshing as the experience of scrolling on Bluesky felt better. I used to spend a lot of time on X but since a few months (or is it years now?) my experience there has been catastrophic. The relevance of the posts, the replies sorting, and many other things have been feeling less and less good. Thus if you follow me on X you may have noticed I am not using it anymore.
Recently I saw this post from Emily Liu (former Bluesky employee) and I found it amazing. Thanks to what an open network brings, it is possible to fetch posts from Bluesky directly on the client side, using the atproto libraries.
I always wondered if I wanted to implement comments handling on my website, if I should use some third party service to handle it for me, with high chances they are hostile, slow or bad for privacy. I wondered if I should implement it myself. Well, finding this post clearly made up my mind: I don't have to do anything, let's just use those Bluesky posts as comments here.
What is amazing with Bluesky saying it is "open" is that you do not even need an API key to fetch its content, you just fetch it. Although I don't have many readers, it should make it easier for people to find the "original" Bluesky post talking about this blog post, and it adds some interactivity to my blog!
How to implement?
Well there are many ways to do it yourself, mainly if you are using React for your website you can simply do npm install bluesky-comments and that's pretty much it. Here are some more references of people implementing it:
- https://graysky.app/blog/2024-02-05-adding-blog-comments
- https://www.coryzue.com/writing/bluesky-comments/
Is it future proof?
Honestly, I don't know much about the ATProtocol that Bluesky relies on. It is still under development and has its own flaws. One question I could not even answer myself is what happens to your account if its PDS shuts down or deletes its data?
There are other alternatives like Mastodon or ActivityPub which also try to make decentralized social network platforms/protocols, and they may be more successful on the long term. But I haven't looked into it, so I don't have any opinion on that topic.
So, I do not know if this is future proof, but who cares you have to live, and as of today, I will fetch comments from Bluesky. I may or may not change my mind :)
So what do you think? Try it!