So I did it. Six months later and I've just, ish, made a basic comment system to integrate with this and it's online here.
I went back and forth a lot in the months after I made that previous post, looking at various options for what to use for the comments. I made plenty of stops and starts using various frameworks and languages, thinking it was a great learning project to get to grips with a new language, but they all went nowhere. I ended up back where I'd started and thought, I know C#, I like to use it, it's comfortable, it's familiar, I'm semi-productive with it, why not use that?
I'd looked into asp.net before. It always seemed sort of an old fogey, not quite as direct as I wanted in terms of deploying the applications to a server, and a bit heavily architected for the very cowboy way I normally work through and build things. All that aside, there's just so much sense in using whatever language I knew well enough so I wasn't learning a new domain as well as a new language at the same time. I bit the bullet and went with it.
Caint.casa is currently just an API with a public (shh, don't tell anybody) admin dashboard to approve, edit, or delete comments. All comment threads are generated on first call from a particular page, so there's no admin necessary to set that all up. As long as requests can be made from the site, then a thread can always exist.
In this first version I haven't segregated threads by site, the placeholder dashboard just lists all comments from the database. This will be changed when I build a proper admin site and I want to add tenant fields to threads/comments to allow me to cleanly separate different website while using the same setup as I have now - this is not really a high performance application, and I want to keep things as simple as possible - as soon as I build this in, I will open up the service to other people if wanted.
All that said, I picked the best possible time to deploy this... The site is hosted on a $5 a month VPS with Digital Ocean, and I provisioned it with Ubuntu 20.10, and ran through the server setup with Nginx etc. I clone the project from my sr.ht, and attempt to run it. Failure. It turns out Nuget has been having issues for the past week with outdated keys being used to sign packages. There've been fixes shipped for all relevant distros, except Ubuntu 20.10. It really put a dampener on my Saturday. These sorts of issues with external errors stopping deployment were what I was really trying to avoid when I was looking for alternatives. I don't use Nuget for any of my other projects for reasons like this.
Hopefully, this will all get sorted soon, and I can update my static templates for this site to incorporate the new comment system.
UPDATE 19/02/2021:
So I've finally gotten everything more or less sorted out with this now. There ended up being a few more issues. I reprovisioned the server with Ubuntu 20.04 which sorted the signing key issue, but ended up using the versions I built on my laptop anyway. Once that was sorted, it set me down an absolute nightmare of a path with CORS.
I spent a lot of time going back and forth wondering why my CORS permissions weren't working. Finally today, I decided to give it a bit of a fresh start and I ended up uninstalling nginx to try it with Caddy. 30 minutes later everything was sorted, it was working perfectly. I definitely made some sort of mistake somewhere with nginx config, but for the life of me I just couldn't find it. I spent about an hour each day, between lunch breaks and evenings, trying to get everything set up correctly, but it just wouldn't get there.
The dashboard app is also underway, it's currently working locally, but I want to add auth control to it before I push it to the server. The code for both of these is hosted on my sr.ht.