The progressive adoption of static site generators (or SSGs, like Jekyll or
Nikola) for blogs has resulted in many sites dropping comments (i.e.
dynamic content), which is detrimental to the use of blogs as a medium for
thoughtful and diverse conversation. To avoid this loss of functionalty,
other static sites have instead opted for centralized, closed and mutually
incompatible platforms (like Disqus or IntenseDebate) to host their comments.
However this adds to the recentralization trend that is plaguing the Internet
in the latest years.
There are Free Software alternatives (like Isso) that allow people to run
their own comment servers. However, they still keep the comments of each site
as a closed silo. In contrast, some months ago Enkidu (Las Indias) started
the development of the WP-GNU social WordPress plugin, which uses
conversations in GNU social (a federated microblogging system) as a
replacement for classic site-only comments.
In a similar spirit, Colaua augments static HTML pages with conversations
hosted in GNU social. The conversation itself is fetched from the GNU social
API using JavaScript code running in the browser and then dynamically included
in the post's comment section. This obviates the need for dynamic server code
(like PHP), keeping the pages amenable to store in distributed systems like
IPFS or ZeroNet.