As the worst winter storm to hit North Carolina in over 2 decades approaches on its direct path over my house with a big ‘ol confetti cannon full of sleet and freezing rain, I decided to spend what precious time I still have with power to build a comment system for my little blog here. I was inspired by Micah Cantor’s blog post titled ”I added a Bluesky comment section to my blog“.

Recently, Casey Newton and Kevin Roose from The Hard Fork Podcast (one of my favorites) partnered with PJ Vogt from The Search Engine Podcast (another favorite) to launch The Forkiverse, which is a decentralized social media platform that is powered by Mastodon. I have chosen The Forkiverse as my home in the Fediverse, which is a growing federation of other services using the same decentralized network. Its population is currently something like 4,000 users who are other Hard Fork and Search Engine listeners, which means they are also probably huge nerds with a sense of humor. My people.

I could have used BlueSky like Micah because I have an active BlueSky profile, they have more users, and I dig what they do over there — especially the decentralized AT Protocol that their engineers are building. But I asked myself, “How would using BlueSky make the founders of The Forkiverse feel like even bigger failures if they gave up and bailed on their half-baked expiriment?”

Introducing the first (that I know of) blog that utilizes The Forkiverse for its comment system. Yes, in lieu of provisioning my own AWS VM and S3 bucket to host my own comments, I decided to use someone else’s compute, bandwidth, storage, and moderation(?) to power my blog’s comment system instead.

I have been a hobbyist web developer — at times professional — since 1995. I built this site with TypeScript using the SvelteKit framework, MSsveX, highlight.js, and Tailwind CSS. I picked the libraries myself and could have painstakingly created everything here by hand like a true artisinal SWE, but I am far too lazy for that shit, so I have been using Claude Code to ply my site with LLM-assisted code to add ridiculous features such as the theme system on the bottom left, the arrow-key controlled blog navigation, and a bunch of backend stuff. I would have never spent the time to develop any of those features otherwise and this new comment feature is no different. By the way, I just read the blog post that inspired this new feature like literally an hour ago. Thanks Claude! High five, buddy.

❯ Claude, can you look at you-can-now-comment-on-my-blog-from-the-forkiverse.md and under # How Claude Did It, can you add a summary with code blocks that explains how you integrated the Forkiverse comments into my blog posts?

How Claude Did It

⏺ Read(src/routes/blog/posts/you-can-now-comment-on-my-blog-from-the-forkiverse.md)
  ⎿  Read 17 lines

⏺ Now let me read the current state of the key files to write an accurate summary.

⏺ Read(src/lib/server/mastodon.ts)
  ⎿  Read 187 lines

⏺ Read(src/lib/components/MastodonComments.svelte)
  ⎿  Read 285 lines

⏺ Read(src/routes/api/mastodon-comments/+server.ts)
  ⎿  Read 16 lines

⏺ Read(src/routes/blog/posts/[slug]/+page.svelte)
  ⎿  Read 37 lines
  ⎿  You've hit your limit · resets 9pm (America/New_York)

❯ /rate-limit-options

───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 What do you want to do?

   1. Stop and wait for limit to reset
   2. Upgrade your plan
❯  3. Post blog as-is and forget to fix it later