Pure Comments natively supports IndieWeb Webmentions and Fediverse Backfeed (via Bridgy).

When you share your blog posts to the Fediverse (such as Mastodon), any likes, boosts, and replies received on that post can be automatically collected and displayed directly on your blog in Pure Comments.

Webmentions allow interactions from other blogs and social networks to live directly on your own site, keeping you in complete ownership of your community engagement.

How It Works

  1. Discovery: Your blog includes a <link rel="webmention"> tag pointing to your Pure Comments endpoint and a <link rel="me"> tag pointing to your personal Mastodon/Fediverse profile.
  2. Publishing / Bridgy Connection: You connect your Mastodon account to Bridgy.
  3. Backfeeding: When you post a toot with a link to your blog post, Bridgy monitors the post for interactions (likes, boosts, replies) and sends them to your Pure Comments webmention receiver.
  4. Display: Likes and boosts appear in a compact reaction facepile with user avatars, whilst replies appear in your comment thread.

Step 1: Configure Webmentions in Pure Comments

  1. Log into your Pure Comments administration panel.
  2. Navigate to Settings and scroll down to the Webmentions & Fediverse section.
  3. Check the box to Enable Webmentions & Fediverse backfeed.
  4. In Personal Fediverse profile URL, enter your full profile link (e.g. https://mastodon.social/@username).
  5. Choose your moderation preferences:
    • Auto-approve reactions: Automatically publish likes and boosts without manual moderation (recommended).
    • Auto-approve replies: Automatically publish incoming text replies and mentions, or leave unchecked to hold them in your moderation queue.
  6. Click Save settings.

Step 2: Add Discovery Tags to Your Blog

Pure Comments will generate the exact HTML snippet needed for discovery. Add these tags into the <head> of your blog or website template. They will look something like this:

<!-- Webmention & Fediverse Discovery -->
<link rel="webmention" href="https://comments.example.com/api/webmention">
<link rel="me" href="https://mastodon.social/@username">
  • Replace https://comments.example.com with your Pure Comments installation URL.
  • Replace https://mastodon.social/@username with your Fediverse profile URL.

If you are using Pure Blog, you can paste these tags directly into the Header Injection setting in your site configuration. You need to do this for both Pages and Posts.

Step 3: Connect Your Fediverse Account to Bridgy

To allow Bridgy to discover interactions and backfeed them to your site:

  1. Visit brid.gy.
  2. Under the Fediverse / Mastodon section, choose Cross-post to a Mastodon account: @you@mastodon.server.
  3. Enter your instance (e.g. mastodon.social or fosstodon.org) and log in to authorise Bridgy.
  4. Enter the URL of your website (not the URL of your Pure Comments site)
  5. Once connected, your account page on Bridgy will show:
    • @username@instance · yoursite.com
    • Backfeeding responses.

Bridgy is now active and will periodically poll your account for interactions on links to your blog.

Step 4: Testing & Daily Use

Whenever you write a new blog post:

  1. Share the link to your post on Mastodon/Fediverse from your connected account.
  2. When followers favourite, boost, or reply to your post, Bridgy will detect them and forward the webmentions to your site.
  3. Reactions (likes & boosts) will immediately appear at the top of your comments section as facepile avatars, and replies will be added into the comment stream.

Bridgy polls on an automated schedule in the background. If you want to check an interaction immediately during testing, you can click Poll now or use the Resend for post tool on your Bridgy dashboard.

Note on replying to Fediverse comments: When you receive comments from the Fediverse, the recommended way to reply is directly from your Mastodon app or client. Bridgy will detect your reply in the live conversation thread and automatically backfeed it into Pure Comments on its next poll.

Outbound Webmention replies: If you reply to a Webmention directly from the Pure Comments administration panel, Bridgy Publish requires your comments installation to either reside on the same domain as your main site or be listed as a link in your Fediverse profile metadata. If your comments installation is on a separate subdomain that is not listed on your profile, Bridgy will not syndicate outbound replies to the Fediverse.