Bussator: implementing webmentions as comments

Alberto Mardegan — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 08:36:34 GMT

Recently I've grown an interest to the indieweb: as big corporations are trying to dictate the way we live our digital life, I'm feeling the need to take a break from at least some of them and getting somehow more control over the technologies I use.

Some projects have been born which are very helpful with that (one above all: NextCloud), but there are also many older technologies which enable us to live the internet as a free distributed network with no owners: I'm referring here to protocols such as HTTP, IMAP, RSS, which I perceive to be under threat of being pushed aside in favor of newer, more convenient, but also more oppressive solutions.

Anyway. The indieweb community is promoting the empowerment of users, by teaching them how to regain control of their online presence: this pivots arund having one's own domain and use self-hosted or federated solutions as much as possible.

One of the lesser known technologies (yet widely used in the indieweb community) is webmentions: in simple terms, it's a way to reply to other people's blog posts by writing a reply in your own blog, and have it shown also on the original article you are replying to. The protocol behind this feature is an recommendation approved by the W3C, and it's actually one of the simplest protocol to implement. So, why not give it a try?

I already added support for comments in my blog (statically generated with Nikola) by deploying Isso, a self-hosted commenting system which can even run as a FastCGI application (hence, it can be deployed in a shared hosting with no support for long-running processes) — so I was looking for a solution to somehow convert webmentions into comments, in order hot to have to deal with two different commenting systems.

As expected, there was no ready solution for this; so I sat down and hacked up Bussator, a WSGI application which implements a webmention receiver and publishes the reply posts as Isso comments. The project is extensible, and Isso is only one of the possible commenting systems; sure, at the moment it's indeed the only one available, but there's no reason why a plugin for Static Man, Commento, Remark or others couldn't be written. I'll happily accept merge requests, don't be shy — or I can write it myself, if you convince me to (a nice Lego box would make me do anything 😉).

The first user of Bussator is this blog, and while the project code is well covered by unit tests, we all know that real life is all another matter; so please bear with me, if not everything works as it should. And that's why I'll be thrilled to see your webmentions replies here.

Ah, and webmentions will allow me to get your Twitter likes and replies published as comments, too — this thanks to Brid.gy!

Mardy (Entratas super indieweb)

Bussator: implementing webmentions as comments