Announcing my latest open source project, in collaboration with @carl
🌵 Cactus Comments - Federated web comments, based on the Matrix protocol.
Docs: https://cactus.chat/
Demo: https://cactus.chat/demo
Source: https://gitlab.com/cactus-comments
Short answer:
Not yet, but it is coming.
Long answer: Yes, in a pretty hacky way. You can do it in two ways:
- manually setting m.room.guest_access in all the comment section rooms you want to require authentication for
- disabling guest registration entirely for the default homeserver
But those hacks will both generate user-visible errors.
See this issue for progress on doing it "cleanly": https://gitlab.com/cactus-comments/cactus-client/-/issues/34
@federico3 @carl I think Matrix is a really good standard for all sorts of communication on the decentralized web.
ActivityPub is cool too, don't get me wrong. But Matrix is a bit more powerful in a batteries-included kind of way.
@asbjorn How hard would it be to embed this into blogs? Seems more useful than making people post from their Mastodon accounts.
@Zach777 it should be very easy to embed in a blog. That's the idea 😇
@njoseph_1 Essentially, yes.
One comment section = one matrix room. Although you can show the same comment section on multiple pages if you want.
@jfred Well, the client does include a link labeled "Use a Matrix client"
That'll let your users open the room via a pre-authenticated client of their choice.
@asbjorn Oh, good point! I think I missed that because the styling doesn't make it super obvious that it's a link, and I'm on a mobile browser where I can't just hover over it.
Is there a way to disable username/password auth entirely and rely solely on the user's client for submission? I'd rather not even ask for their creds.
(My current blog isn't a static site, so I don't currently have a use case for this, but I might in the future!)
@jfred Hahah, web styling isn't my strong side 😅 Thanks for the fedback!
There isn't a config option to disable the authentication bits per se, but you could always hide the elements you don't want by editing the CSS file.
@asbjorn No problem! :)
Good luck with the project, it looks really cool!
@Bubu @jfred @asbjorn @carl some link like that might be preferable: https://matrix.to/#/#test123:cactus.chat right?
@freaktechnik I sure hope so!
@davidak
I don't think Matrix is strictly an instant-messaging system at all. I think it is (or has potential to be) a great general-purpose network for real-time JSON replication.
Actually we did compare other self-hosted solutions before beginning Cactus Comments. The fact that it's built on an open, federated standard gives it a lot of extra features. Client compabability, resiliency to downtime, privacy, identity defragmentation, are among those. Centralized solutions have disadvantages.
@davidak If you're more curious about my comparisons to other systems, I can share some excerpts from my BSc project, which I did on Cactus Comments. 🤗
@asbjorn sure. feel free to share
@asbjorn @carl damn, that looks simple to use and even self host.