I’ve been wanting to experiment with adding a comments section to posts and pages on my website for a while now. Rather than using one of those comments-as-a-service companies, I figured a lighter-weight solution would be re-using a social tool I’m already invested in: Mastodon.
OP here: I haven't tested how exactly this would work but I think with some tweak to the scraping script I think I could have it hide muted comments pretty easily. From there moderation would also fall back to how things work on Mastodon- if someone is posting abusive comments I can report the post and have the instance admins take whatever action necessary against the infringer.