HPR4133: Mastodon as a way to comment to HPR episodes

Mastodon as a way to comment to HPR episodes

Prompted by Knightwise

• I should be easier for listeners to discuss shows.
• There have been several times I have intended to leave a comment on a show, but I forget by the time I get back to my PC
• Mastodon is made for community interaction.
• If you are active on mastodon, replying to a mastodon post is probably easier than the HPR comment form.

HPR Bot

• HPR has a mastodon bot that makes a post when a new show is released
• The Bot's post and replies can be used as a comment system for HPR
• https://botsin.space/@hpr

Easy Methods to including Mastodon on a static page

• Each post has an embed link, but it does not include replies.
• JavaScript can be used to display the post and replies
  • Example https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-static-blog-with-mastodon/
  • Carl Schwan - KDE developer
• Neither of these is ideal

Mastodon API

• Mastodon has an API that can be used to pull a list of status updates.
• The comments can be pulled from the API and added to the static site.

Proof of concept

• HPR site using RSS feeds as the data source
• https://gitlab.com/norrist/hprfeed2db
  • Full episode feed
  • Comments feed.
  • HPR Episodes 3637 and 3654
    • https://hpr.norrist.xyz/episodes/HPR3637.html
    • https://hpr.norrist.xyz/episodes/HPR3654.html
• Add a new step to pull in the HPR Bot post replies as comments.
• As a demo https://hpr.norrist.xyz will have mastodon comments on recent episode pages.

get_mastodon_comments.py

• load_comments_from_bot()
  • look for status updates regex "New Episode: hpr(\d+) :: "
• get_thread_comments()
  • builds list of descendants - aka comments
• update_db()
  • loops through list of comments
  • extracts - author, content, , pubdate, ...
  • inserts into sqlite database along with data from full episode and comment feeds.
• HTML template displays mastodon comments underneath the comments from the comment RSS feed.

Mastodon Comment Moderation

• I didn't implement any moderation, but there are a few possible ways to do so
  1. Maintain a list of approved contributors. When an unapproved commenter posts
     • notify the admin that there are comments by a new commenter
     • skip adding any comments to the database until the commenter is added to the approve list
  2. Maintain a list of approved comments
     • comments have unique id
     • Add approved comment ID to a database
     • Only display approved comments.

Going Forward

• Even without including mastodon comments on the HPR Page
• Increase awareness of HPR on Mastodon
  0. Follow the HPR bot on mastodon.
  1. Tag yourself when one of your shows is posted by the HPR.
  2. Add your mastodon account to your HPR profile / show notes.
  3. Comment on the HPR bots mastodon post.

Links

• My mastodon account - https://noc.social/@norrist
• Python to get mastodon comments - https://gitlab.com/norrist/hprfeed2db/-/blob/main/get_mastdon_comments.py
• Example page with Mastodon Comments - https://hpr.norrist.xyz/episodes/HPR4126.html
  • This page may not have any mastodon comments depending on when you check the page.
  • Check a more recent page if there are no mastodon comments.

HPR Comments

Archer72 says: Ken's comment

Mastodon Comments

More Information...