Hello, Cactus Comments! 👋🌵

Today, Asbjørn and I are very excited to announce Cactus Comments! 🎉

Cactus Comments is a federated, web-embeddable comment system. We federate by building on Matrix - an open standard for decentralized communication. We believe that Matrix will become the de facto standard for the next generation of open web systems!

On the frontend - your website - we embed a Matrix client written in Elm that renders Matrix rooms as comment sections. The client is designed to be especially easy to embed on static sites. Once you log in to the client, it will only communicate directly with your Matrix server of choice.

On the backend, an application service is used to create rooms on-demand and help with moderation. It is built with Python and is completely stateless. It does this by modelling all state in native Matrix objects without any custom events – pretty neat indeed!

The entire thing is free and open source software and we welcome contributions. We host a public instance to make it very easy to get started. Thanks for reading and we hope you will enjoy Cactus Comments!