I've been on Bluesky a lot lately. I joined about a year and half ago, but since it blew up at the beginning of the month,¹ it's been exciting to see everything people have been doing with it. It feels like the platform has truly made it now that the tinkerers are out in force, and their experiments have felt like something from an earlier internet era, when user control was at a premium and we weren't all so hemmed in by apps rigorously streamlined to keep us from navigating away.

On an open network, so much more is possible. Bluesky's a big sandbox where people have been figuring out how to connect skeets² to the pages of the internet through Chrome extensions, how to create their own customized filtering algorithms, and, as I discovered a couple of weeks ago, how to turn Bluesky's threaded replies into slick comment sections.

I first caught the idea from Emily Liu, who posted this:

also, any replies in this thread will appear as comments on the blog post itself. made possible by the aforementioned Open Network 🫡ft. @shreyanjain.net's reply below

[image or embed]

— Emily (

@emilyliu.me

)

November 24, 2024 at 5:58 PM

And a short while later, Cory Zue followed up, turning Liu's work into a pluggable npm package.

After seeing @emilyliu.me 's post this morning about using Bluesky for the comments section on her site, I had to try it. Here's a writeup on how to do it, with everything you need to set it up yourself in five minutes. Leave a comment on this post to test it out! www.coryzue.com/writing/blue...

[image or embed]

— Cory Zue (

@coryzue.com

)

November 25, 2024 at 6:49 AM

I've been wanting a way to add comments to my posts, if only to incentivize myself to post more often, so I decided to get in on the fun myself. Rather than just grabbing Zue's plugin, though, I opted to reverse-engineer some of his and Liu's work in .tsx files into straight .js files, for compatibility with my existing Gatsby setup. After some copying over into a series of components and a bit of refactoring, you can observe the results below.

Is it wise to pull in a comment section from Bluesky? I suppose we could debate about it, though I don't think it's much different from pulling in replies from some other service, like Disqus. Plus, because the comments are entirely built in their own set of components, I can strip them back out if they ever feel like a mistake, or if Bluesky itself ever goes the way of enshittification. This is, in the end, just a trial run. Nothing's gotta be permanent when users have control.

I still have a few tweaks to make. I want to include some of Zue's filtering options, for instance, to do away with repetitive replies such as the 📌, should they become an annoyance. But for now, comments are at least here and working. Let me know what you think.

Footnotes

1. When so many people flocked from the bird app, as the now-blatant mouthpiece continues to enshittify. ↩

2. Yes, I've accepted that's what they're called. ↩