WordPress and Bluesky – Opening the conversation

tl;dr; There’s a new WordPress plugin that replaces your comment section with Bluesky replies, and I think it’ll combine the best of blogging with the best of social media.

I mourn it be because of a very small feature that was almost as important as the blog’s title – the comment indicator (ignore the G+ icon, I can only rant about one thing at a time…)

That comment indicator told you where the conversations were happening, in a time before conversations moved to Reddit and social media. Since then some plugins have tried to make the comments section into a community, and Disqus and Discourse have been somewhat successful. But it never felt natural – it involved paying attention to extra places where your focus wasn’t, relying on things like emails and push notification to bring you back.

With the amazing evolution of the AT Protocol, in particular Bluesky, there’s an amazing opportunity to connect all the conversations, largely thanks to the insight provided by Emily Liu that blog comments could be pulled from Bluesky.

Now, thanks to the 2.0 release of Marko Banušić’s Bluesky plugin, bloggers can publish posts directly to their Bluesky account and have all the Bluesky conversation show up on the blog – keeping the conversation going across all the platforms. The result slides in naturally with the blog comments, such as this screenshot pulling in replies from this thread:

There are a couple of tradeoffs, which could be blessings or curses depending on your perspective:

• All comments are rendered on the client side from the browser, so there’s no SEO benefit. Yay=no reasons for bots to come after your comment section. Maybe boo=your own words are all the SEO juice you’re going to get.
• Replying requires people to have a Bluesky account.

I’m excited to see where this plugin goes from here, and I’m optimistic that the combination of WordPress+Bluesky will create content-first conversations that are engaging. What do you think?