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Static Blog Comments

JP Hutchins June 21, 2026
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I had read about IndieWeb, webmentions, and Fediverse a few years ago and was very excited about it! It’s a monumental under taking and a great example of good (read: ethical) tech.

But I am not a web developer 🤣, and while I can appreciate what the engineers have accomplished, I was never too sure how to get it going, end-to-end.

I’ve been burning quite a few tokens while LLMs are still basically “free” (see shellac’s analysis), so I decided to let Claude Code slop together a plan from the following resources, particularly the posts by engineers that have implemented for their own static sites.

You can see this site’s source to see how the implementation went. I suppose it’s not tested until this post goes live and I see it federated.

Update: it’s working!

LLM Disclosure

The following citations were assembled from the same claude-opus-4-8 context that provided the webmentions + giscus implementation for this blog. The implementation is the result of my feeding in a subset of those articles and iterating until I approved the design and eventually the implementation itself.

#Bridgy Fed & federation

  • Bridgy Fed docs
  • bridgy-fed FEDERATION.md
  • snarfed/bridgy-fed
  • IndieWeb: Bridgy Fed

#Webmentions (receiving replies)

  • webmention.io
  • webmention.io API README
  • webmention.io #126 — avatar rehosting
  • IndieWeb: Webmention

#Updating webmentions on a static site

  • Nicolas Hoizey — Updating webmentions on a static site
  • Sebastian De Deyne — Webmentions with GitHub Actions
  • Max Böck — Using webmentions on static sites
  • Jan Monschke — Adding webmentions to your static blog

#Microformats2 (h-card / h-entry / h-feed)

  • representative h-card (indieweb)
  • representative h-card (microformats.org)
  • h-entry
  • h-feed
  • h-card

#Bluesky / AT Protocol (custom-handle verification)

  • com.atproto.identity.resolveHandle
  • PLC Directory
  • app.bsky.feed.getAuthorFeed

#Feed discovery

  • Astro RSS recipe
  • feed (jpmonette/feed)

#Refresh-workflow plumbing

  • GITHUB_TOKEN no-recursion rule
  • actions/checkout #1550 — sparse-checkout
  • community #25702 — push-from-action triggering

#GitHub-comments fallback & safety

  • giscus
  • giscus ADVANCED-USAGE (theme postMessage)
  • sanitize-html

#Landscape / inspiration

  • Cassidy James — Mastodon-powered blog comments
  • Greg Newman — Mastodon comments in Astro
  • zerok/retoots
  • Dan MacKinlay — Comment systems for static websites
  • Darek Kay — Static site comments

Discussion in the ATmosphere

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