Tagcomments

A post gets read, and then it goes somewhere: into a toot, a message, an email to one person. Until now the reader did that by copying the address out of the bar. 1.6 puts a row of controls under the post for it — off unless share: names what you want, drawn in the order you name it.

share:
  - mastodon
  - bluesky
  - email
  - copy
  - system

What is prefilled, and what is not

The post's name and its address, where the target takes both. Facebook and LinkedIn take the address alone and read the name off the page. The reader writes the part that is theirs. bluesky, email, facebook, linkedin, threads and x are plain links, one address each, no script behind them.

Three that are not links

Comments here are replies to a toot, and GoToSocial speaks Mastodon's API — so comments on a GTS instance should have simply worked. They did not, not once, and nobody saw it fail: arch-linux.cz, the first site to pair this engine with its own GTS instance, had never shown a single comment under any post. My own tests had Mastodon on both ends, so they could never have caught it.

Dialect is not language

Two accents were in the way. GoToSocial writes a status address in its own shape, and the engine's pattern insisted on Mastodon's — a numeric id where GTS answers with a 26-character ULID. And GTS requires a token even to read a public thread, where Mastodon hands it to anyone who asks. The first accent broke the address parsing; the second broke the entire idea of live comments, which is a visitor's browser fetching the thread — a browser you cannot give a token to.

Moderation is the door in

The comments under these posts are replies to a toot. That has been the whole system since the beginning, and its one weak spot was always that it is all or nothing: every reply appears, or comments are off.

comments.approval: fav is the third answer. A reply appears under the article once I favourite it, from whatever client I happen to have open.

No queue, no dashboard

That is the point of doing it this way. A moderation queue is a second interface, with a second login, that you visit specially — which means you visit it late, or not at all. Here the interface is the app the comments already live in. I read the reply where I was going to read it anyway, and approving is one tap in that same place.

Two rules keep the result readable rather than merely filtered. My own replies need no star, because nobody stars themselves and half of every exchange would otherwise vanish. And a reply is shown only if everything between it and the announcement is shown too — an approved answer to a rejected comment answers nothing.

Post read: $0.005 per resource. Post creation: $0.015 per request — $0.200 when it carries a URL. Free public read access: none.— X API pay-per-use pricing, docs.x.com, checked July 2026

Two networks are in. Two are not — and here's the whole reasoning, because "we decided against it" is not a reason.

./blog.sh announces every published post on Mastodon or Bluesky, and the replies to that announcement become the post's comments. For that to work, the engine needs two things from a network: a way to post, and a way for a browser to read a public thread. Cheap, ideally free, forever — because a personal blog is a decades-long project with a hobby budget.

X: no

Look at that price list again. Announcing a post with a link costs real money. Loading the reply thread — which happens every time anyone scrolls to the comments — costs real money, per read, forever. On a personal blog, that's a subscription to your own comment section, billed by your readers' curiosity.

There's no engineering answer to a pricing decision. So: no.

Threads: not yet

The star, boost and reply counters sitting right under this post's title belong to a toot, not to this site. And the comments at the bottom of this page are that toot's replies. That's the whole system — here's how it works.

When a post is published, the engine announces it on Mastodon or Bluesky — one network per site, never both; the build refuses a config with two, because comments live in exactly one place. Replies to that announcement are the comments: your browser loads the thread straight from the network's public API, no login, no key, no middleman. The counters under the title are the same numbers, read from the same toot.

What falls out of that

No comment database — nothing to migrate, back up, or moderate at 2am. No spam filter, because the network already has one, and it's better funded than mine. The comment count is just the reply count. And moderation is your instance's moderation: block, mute and report all work exactly where the conversation actually happens.