Integrating comments via the Fediverse

My old blog had (has) comments via the Blogger.com platform, but I did not have anything for the new blog. A couple of options are used, like Disqus and comments via GitHub. However, these both have the downside of a vendor lock-in and the whole point of moving my blog was to break out from such lock-ins.

Almost half a year ago I read this post by Bastian about, well, integrating comments via the Fediverse. He explains a solution worked out in 2021 by Robert W. Gehl. I liked this idea and had the blog post bookmarked for some time. But I did not get around working it out until Monday. I had to do some CSS fixing after that, but I can now have fediverse-powered comments in my blog by adding a bit of YAML, like this:

comments:
  host: social.edu.nl
  username: egonw
  id: 115009169485329450

I have annotated a few posts now, and will have some curation to do. But when I have made such a link, the this is what it will look like by default:

After clicking the button (I want to style that a bit better), it shows the fediverse reactions:

There are some things that I like to improve. For example, clicking the reply, boost, or like buttons doesn't do anything yet. But there is code around that will show a popup box to redirect you to your home fediserver. Let's see how this evolves.