How I added a comments section to my blog, using Bluesky

A few months have passed since I first started feeling the need for a space where I could write about what I think and what I do. Within a few days, that urge — paired with the desire to explore SvelteKit as a full-stack framework — gave shape to this blog.

I was very happy with the elegant, minimal look I had achieved after just a few iterations. The only missing piece was a comments section at the bottom of each article: the thought that what I write here could spark interesting discussions is perhaps the thing that drives me most to write on the web.

And that’s how I ended up in an endless cycle of research — the kind I dive into every time I’m faced with the burden of choosing a tool or service for some new project. This time, though, it didn’t take me long to realize the choice was almost a given: Disqus, born in 2007, spread quickly and became the most widely used service by online publications of all sizes. That’s probably why I already knew about it, and my research only served to reinforce some of the opinions I had already formed over time.

To begin with, Disqus’s main revenue source is advertising. This means that, as highlighted in this and this article (and there are countless others online), blog pages turn into full-blown ad boards over which the author has absolutely no control. On top of being aesthetically unpleasant and yet another sneaky way for tech companies to harvest data, this also takes a toll on performance: every time an article loads, a barrage of ads (with their links, images, and videos) must be downloaded by the reader’s browser, inevitably degrading the experience.

Moreover, something many people overlook is the ownership of comments, which live on Disqus’s servers. This means that neither the author nor the readers have full control over what happens to them: they could all vanish overnight for no apparent reason.

During my research I discovered several alternatives that try to address some of these issues (for example, Commento and Hyvor Talk), but it was when I stumbled upon this article by Emily Liu that a quirky idea began to take shape. Emily was, at the time, “Head of Special Projects” at Bluesky, a social network that positions itself as an alternative to Twitter (now X) with some interesting peculiarities.

As explained in her article, and in other posts on the same blog, Bluesky is a decentralized and open social network. Decentralized in the sense that user data lives across multiple servers, and users themselves can handle it as they please, moving it from one server to another with complete freedom. Open in the sense that all of Bluesky’s source code is open source, and its APIs are free and available to everyone.

These are perfect conditions for using Bluesky posts as comments. All you have to do is publish a post on Bluesky mentioning that you’ve written a new article on your blog and then, with a simple call to the Bluesky API from the article’s page, you can display all replies to that post on the same page, as if they were comments on the article itself. Other people (see this and this article) had started adopting the same approach on their blogs, so, intrigued, I decided to try integrating it into my embryonic blog — and I immediately noticed at least two limitations. The process of adding a new article became cumbersome: first I publish the article, then I publish the post linking to the article, and then I use the post’s identifier to republish the article with the correct Bluesky API call. A real hassle. On top of that, readers couldn’t authenticate directly in the comments section to interact (leave a like, repost, or reply with a comment) — they had to open the post on Bluesky to do so. Too much friction for a reader who simply wants to join the conversation.

So I figured I could solve these problems and, after a few months of tinkering, today I published Juttu, an open source software that follows the same logic but addresses the issues I just mentioned. You can install it by copying these two lines of HTML, replacing the Bluesky username with your own and giving the article an ID of your choice (for example, “my-first-article”).

<div id="juttu-comments"></div>
<script
  defer
  src="https://juttu.app/embed/juttu-embed.min.js"
  data-bsky-user-handle="your-handle.bsky.social"
  data-article-id="your-article-slug"
></script>

The result is visible in the comments section below, while the code — which you can find in this GitHub repo — can be browsed, forked, modified, and self-hosted freely by anyone. The documentation is available at this link.

While creating Juttu I got to know the community called “ATmosphere,” the community of applications built on AT Protocol — the open protocol created by Bluesky to allow building applications with “social” features that share the characteristics mentioned earlier (open and decentralized), and more. Inspired by what the members of this community are building, I’d also love to try my hand at creating a social network based on AT Protocol, but that’s material for another article.

What’s certain is that I’ll commit to refining and improving Juttu to make it a solid alternative to Disqus. The first topic I’ll tackle is comment moderation: on this front, Bluesky and AT Protocol provide dedicated tools that I’ll need to figure out how to integrate. Let me know if you try installing Juttu on your blog — any feedback is more than welcome at this early stage.

Thanks for reading :)

Matteo

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[1] Rosanna. “Watch Out for Ads! Disqus Comments Have Gone ‘Premium’.” By Rosanna, April 16, 2018. https://www.byrosanna.co.uk/blog/watch-out-for-ads-disqus-comments-have-gone-premium

[2] Southgate, Ryan. “Goodbye Disqus — Your Injected Ads Are Horrible.” ryansouthgate.com, September 30, 2025. https://ryansouthgate.com/goodbye-disqus/

[3] Commento — Add Comments to Your Website. Commento.io. https://commento.io

[4] Hyvor Talk — Privacy-First Commenting Platform. Hyvor. https://talk.hyvor.com/

[5] Liu, Emily. “Using Bluesky Posts as Blog Comments.” emilyliu.me, November 24, 2024. https://emilyliu.me/blog/comments

[6] Liu, Emily. “How Your Newsroom Can Use Bluesky This Election Season.” emilyliu.me, January 24, 2024. https://emilyliu.me/blog/bluesky-for-elections

[7] Liu, Emily. “Benefits of an Open Network.” emilyliu.me, November 24, 2024. https://emilyliu.me/blog/open-network

[8] Zue, Cory. “Adding Bluesky-Powered Comments to Any Website in Five Minutes.” coryzue.com, November 25, 2024. https://www.coryzue.com/writing/bluesky-comments/

[9] Moallem, Jonathan. “The Absolute Simplest Way to Use Your Bluesky Posts as a Blog Comment Backend.” Caps Collective, November 26, 2024. https://capscollective.com/blog/bluesky-blog-comments/