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Shameless plug, but I wrote a post on the pros/cons/implications of using Mastodon to power a comments section:

https://jszym.com/blog/mastodon_blog_comments/

I do this too, and I like it a lot: https://www.jefftk.com/p/mastodon-replies-as-comments

> Using Mastodon to power our comments means that every time someone visits the blog post, the user’s browser makes a request to your Mastodon instance. ... I’d proxy these requests through my server, but it’s yaks all the way down.

I do proxy these, and it's not too much work [1]. A major reason to proxy is so you can cache: if a blog post gets HN'd it could easily get more traffic than your Mastodon instance would like to receive.

[1] https://github.com/jeffkaufman/webscripts/blob/master/commen...

I would simply throttle those requests. Update comments once an hour. Or once a day. Not everything needs to be realtime.

I think by "proxy the requests", they mean, these are usually on a static site and the browser is directly pulling in the Mastodon content client-side. They want to be good citizens and add a caching layer that they run.

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