@jszym
You’re part of the way there for me, but I wanted to go off to the nether regions of being able to use the blog itself as a standalone instance. The WordPress plugin allows for native moderation and comment handling to come into play. Even Askimet spam detection works with the activitypub comments as well.

Of course this comment is coming from said blog as proof of its ability to do all the things.
I would love to find a way for Hugo/Jekyll to do this, but the only way I can see is with brid.gy’s help.

On a different tangent, I saw another blogger do the exact same thing you’ve done, only with Bluesky/ATProto comments. A new day is on the horizon! I personally like the “gatekeeping” method this offers as far as commenting. The hard part with the ActivityPub part is being able to include everyone in the discussion. Your instance may block smaller instances, or hasn’t ‘discovered’ them all so there’s a chance my little one-man instance won’t get seen by yours, nor will my comment be included.