Enabling Cactus Comments 👋🌵

As the fan of Matrix that I am, I have decided to enable Cactus Comments: privacy conscious and decentralized comments for my blog posts, powered by the Matrix network.

I took the approach of not hotlinking the js and CSS resources, but serve them from my page, as you can see from your web browser’s developer tools (I will need to bump their versions on my own in the future).

The js consists of a minimal Matrix web client written in Elm. Hence, you can see it connects to Cactus’ Matrix homeserver: matrix.cactus.chat.

For security, I have configured it to require login with a Matrix client (prompted by a matrix.to URL), as I don’t want the responsibility of people entering their Matrix credentials into js that I control.

I have also deactivated anonymous comments, to curtail spam.

The CSS style that Cactus Comments ships is pretty minimal, you can see that they have inherited my page’s style and blended nicely as if they where always there.

In the future, it would be nice to use my own Matrix self-hosted instance instead of matrix.cactus.chat. But I’m postponing that until Cactus doesn’t depend on Guest users for displaying the comments and instead uses the upcoming /peek Matrix endpoint.

For managing all the comments, I’ve clicked on all the blog comments to open each respective room, added all of them to a Matrix private Space, selected low priority for the rooms, and set them to notify on all messages. Cactus doesn’t have anything specific for notifications, so that will do for now.

With that said, Hello Cactus! 👋🌵