Serendipity Forums

Is there any reason to hope for Comments being enabled any time in the foreseeable future, please?

If not I'm going to look for a discussion forum, self-hosted or one that I manage but that's hosted on Bluehost, to which I may direct readers of imperfectchristians.net

Thanks.

Hi David. Sorry, what do you mean exactly? Comments are enabled in Serendipity, so I think there is something missing here?

I'm sorry, I shouldn't post when over-tired.

I meant the ability of people to subscribe to a blog, be notified of new posts, and to be able to discuss them.

As I recall we discussed this many months ago, and there was something 'broken' in all of that, but it was a back-burner project without a completion target date.

Thanks (and sorry if it was fixed and I failed to notice that).

Ah, okay.

That might be a bit of a rehash, but the current situation is that Serendipity expects your readers to subscribe to your blog with a feedreader. https://aboutfeeds.com/ for example explains that, and I recently implemented a feature that will show a short explanation and link to such an article directly when visiting the feed with a web browser (so that would be in the next release if not removed again in the future).

One relatively popular alternative in my circle is mastodon. You can use a service like https://mastofeed.org/ to post your new feed entries automatically to a mastodon account, and readers can subscribe to that account. So that's a twitter like alternative to using a feedreader, and gives you the option to interact with readers outside the blog. https://kirche.social/explore might be a fitting instance for your site - seems to be mainly german, but is tagged as also allowing english posts.

I present both options in my sidebar like this:
The RSS icon on the left goes to the feed, the Mastodon icon to my mastodon account, "Blog abonnieren" => "Subscribe to this blog".

If I remember correctly what you was searching was a way to subscribe by email to new posts. I still see the problem there that this would constitute as a newsletter, which many or at least some hosters forbid - and this was the functionality a different developer proposed for Serendipity but could not be integrated because of development details. You could instead point your readers to a service like https://blogtrottr.com/ that uses your existing feed to send emails instead - it's free (with ads) or cheap (without) for your readers, though I don't see a widget you could embed in the blog directly.

The github issue to either correct the message about emailing subscribers or to implement the feature is still open, but a dev would need to come forward to do that work. I might do so myself at some point, maybe it can be done with reasonable effort as a plugin, but with doubts about offering the functionality it's hard to find the time.

As a side note, if the discussion between your readers is that important to you, a discussion forum outside of the blog - or even instead? - might be exactly right for you, independent of s9y having email subscriptions for new entries or not.

Thank you for taking the time to share all of that - it helps me to think about the alternatives.

It is important to me that people be able to ask questions so that they actually understand the texts, rather than passively agreeing without truly understanding.

Do I understand, correctly, that the RSS would capture new posts to the Serendipity blog and send them to Mastodon - then, people who are subscribed to the Mastodon-associated account would see them and could interact with them? (Could the RSS work in reverse? Populating the Blog from comments posted on Mastodon - or something similar?)

DavidC wrote: Tue Sep 16, 2025 8:41 pm Do I understand, correctly, that the RSS would capture new posts to the Serendipity blog and send them to Mastodon - then, people who are subscribed to the Mastodon-associated account would see them and could interact with them?

Yes. They would see a short post that links to the original blog post. They could then either comment on Mastodon or directly under the blog post.

DavidC wrote: Tue Sep 16, 2025 8:41 pm (Could the RSS work in reverse? Populating the Blog from comments posted on Mastodon - or something similar?)

That would then not work via RSS, but it is theoretically possible to mirror comments from Mastodon under the blog article. Mastodon offers that option. But there is no Serendipity plugin yet that enables that functionality.

Thank you.