With inspiration from Matthias, I hacked in comments to my site using the Searchcaster API and Farcaster Protocol. I’d walk you through it here, but it was largely the same implementation so check out his post for details. The trickiest bit was the recursion for nesting comments nicely, so do watch that.
I’m hoping I can find some time in 2023 to create a Gatsby plugin for this so others can do this even easier. The current template comes with Disqus comments out of the box, but it’d be great to give folks other accessible options for comments.
UX considerations
I’ll extend Matthias’ post a bit with some UX considerations I was thinking about when implementing this.
-
This naive approach will show all comments regardless of their moderation. Without a server, moderation gets tricky also. For a plugin, I’d probably just include options to exclude specific cast IDs so they can be manually removed at least.
-
I’d like to add a “reply” button to each comment that would allow for replies inline. This would be a great way to get people to engage with the content and foster some use of Farcaster. I need to look into authenticating with Farcaster and how to do that outside a native client.
-
Discove has provided a pretty great client for Farcaster so I’ve linked there in most cases, but need to consider how to handle more client-less protocol links as the ecosystem grows.
That’s all for today. Hope you have a great wrap to 2022. See you in the new year!