[rheide]

I reached the same conclusion for my own static blog. One step beyond just having an email link is to run an AWS lambda that takes a web form post and sends you an email with the contents. That way you can add a captcha (hCaptcha seems like a good alternative to Google), and your email address doesn't float around on the public internet. It's fairly low maintenance and easy to replace if you ever did want to step away from AWS.

[mro_name]

why would I use 'my' email address?

The blog is on a domain, that comes with tons of email adresses. Doesn't it? So just ínvent a dedicated one that well may float. Change once appropriate.

Catching a form-post on the server doesn't take AWS (unless you only ask the Amazon evangelists). 50 lines of bash cgi do it for me.

[masklinn]

Hell you could use the post-id as the address, making dispatch even easier.

The next step would probably be to use a mailing list program for the comments, allowing subscriptions / notifications.

[mro_name]

indeed, or websub comments from other places. Or Activitypub…

Each microblog is a comment system – just reverse from what a blog wants.

The Fediverse really could help if just somebody would implement such a comment engine. But that engine has to be deployed decentral. On each blog.

[masklinn]

> The Fediverse really could help if just somebody would implement such a comment engine. But that engine has to be deployed decentral. On each blog.

I’m really not sure what you mean with that. The old blogs generation had a pingbacks system, but it’s really not suitable for commenting: that is usually not moderated by the target, it requires having set up your own blog, it’s really inconvenient for discussions when you have to keep jumping through (unless you use a federation tool but then it’s back to centralisation), and it can be awkward to reply through a blog post as the reply might not rise to that level of interest to your own subscribers, plus the subject at hand might not be one you aim to cover in your normal posting.

[mro_name]

the fediverse promises to connect across instances.

Imagine your blog is one, too and can receive likes and replies just like any other fediverse instance. Each comment is both on the commenters fediverse profile as well as under the blog article that it refers to.

[masklinn]

That’s about what I expected, and really mostly awful for the reasons explained above (and then some).

[throwthere]

lambda functions are arguably a lot simpler and easier to toss in the static site mix than a server properly configured for cgi.

[mro_name]

you are definitively not on shared hosting webspace, are you?

What is your baseline and how is that simpler?

[throwthere]

These kinds of static sites are generally served from a shared host like GitHub Pages, Netlify, etc. The baseline is configuring Jeykyll or whatever the first time.

imo lambda/serverless can get overdone and too complicated but it works well for one-off services like this.

[mro_name]

ah - I would never have thought of putting something that invites comments on a web space with TOS of e.g. github.

You want a custom domain anyway, don't you? The space won't be an issue then, is it?