Unpopular opinion: Disqus is the Internet's welcoming gift to the small and medium bloggers
I'm talking about those who host their blogs statically on Github Pages and elsewhere, the small peasants of the Interwebs who collectively make up the biggest portion of it and make its wheels churn with their content and toil.
All that negativity I'm seeing towards Disqus is baseless. They criticize it for showing ads and being less privacy friendly but then which technology today isn't? Name me one company from Big Tech or Silicon Valley which actually respects their user's privacy in practice, not just words. You'll be left scratching your heads for a long time but no name will come out.
And I also keep hearing about these "self hosted" alternatives like Commento but none of them have gained any traction. Building and implementing a commenting system isn't easy even though CMS like Wordpress try their best. Unless you implement social OAuth logins like Github or Google, not many folks will like to interact on your site by singing up for a whole new site account, especially true if you're a small blogger who has just started. And managing all the data communication between the frontend and backend isn't easy.
With Disqus, we get this whole setup and workflow readymade with nice looking dashboard and all, and that too for gratis, not a dime to pay! Then why shouldn't a blogger use it, I'm yet to hear any justifiable answer to this question.
If they're not doing better, than why bother?
Commenting systems are easy for small sites: Have an email address, and copy/paste approved comments. If you need something bigger, automating posting of email is a problem solved 10,000 times over.
How will you handle spam in the comments? Wordpress has proven solutions like the Akismet plugin, Disqus has its own equivalent. Is there any DIY equivalent for that?
In my email-based solution: Manual review for small scale, use spam filters or whitelisting email addresses for anything larger. Have a 'report' button that uses a mailto with a subject line that identifies reported post and dispose of any reports with no body.
I'll admit things start getting complicated as you scale, but really no worse than other 'pay someone else to do it' solutions.
Thanks, manual review should be more than enough at my scale for now. Other than that, the usual filtering options like cloudflare blocking should also help.
I host my comments using Giscus. I don't have a lot of comments yet (in fact, I have non atm XD), but requiring a Github account probably helps with filtering.
Has anyone seen a lot of activity on small blogs comment sections? I feel like they've been mostly dead for at least a decade.
If they are dead, I strongly feel they should be revived, those bloggers should be encouraged to post more. The web was a much better and happier place when it was controlled by these small technologists rather than the big ones!
Although I agree with you that the internet used to be more interesting, I fail to envision any realistic way to achieve that.
No one single person can achieve that, it has to be a collective effort.
Many years ago in the 1980s, perhaps in the era of your parents, there used to be the global hegemony of a handful of oligarchs called OPEC or "Organization of Petrol Exporting Countries". These handful of Gulf countries used to determine what the retail price of petrol (gasoline) and diesel will be throughout the world. Those were today's equivalent of "Big Tech", people used to think that their reign will continue till all eternity.
But eventually, America played its cards (rightly or wrongly) and their hegemony was broken. It took some time, of course, didn't happen in one single day. But eventually, even the great OPEC had to cede control over the market. Even though they are still the biggest oil producers in the world, other options do exist today and moreover, US geopolitical control over them ensures that they won't monopolize again.
Similarly, Big Tech will also be broken one day. We don't know where the force will come from or what form it will take but like all monopolies and hegemonies in history, this one will also see its end.
You'll notice my blog is static HTML, with no Javascript or embedding (on principle; one of my todos, which will probably permanently take a back seat to writing, which you may notice is also not exactly high on the priority list, is to set up a CSP that say "absolutely not") and therefore no dynamic comments.
My opinion on this is: I don't want the operational or community-management overhead of dealing with comments on my blog. If folks want to comment on my blog, they can post it on any of the Internet's hojillion link aggregators and discuss it there. If I become aware of such a conversation and I have an account on said link aggregator, I'll happily participate.
I largely agree with you and get where you're coming from.
However, those "hojillion social networks" are slowly but surely consolidating into business interests that seek profitability from the content posted there and nothing else. They are leaving no stone unturned to monetize things. There is no doubt that networks like Tildes and Mastodon came into existence for this very reason - people who had zero interest in cultivating or nurturing content started becoming owners and gatekeepers of that content everywhere. Otherwise, we would most likely be having this discussion on that other site with the red colored tinfoily hat cartoon logo, not on Tildes.
Given such a dark and dismal situation, it becomes glaringly important that the small bloggers themselves start taking charge of their site's commenting and other social features. It acts as backup or future proofing. What happens tomorrow if the remaining social networks also start going the commercial route? (given the profit seeking human nature, this is a very real possibility).
This is a concern mostly if all the remaining social networks launch themselves down the enshittification chute. That includes independent noncommercial sites like Tildes and Lobste.rs (relevant given my general topics), thousands of very ideological Mastodon/Lemmy/other ActivityPub instances, etc. etc. I don't think that's a credible worry. Sure, reddit isn't a decent place to have a conversation anymore, but no single social network is, has ever been, or will ever be, the whole Internet.
I thought the best one is Ghost, it’s lean and just works.
Unless something drastic has changed since I was last doing web design my opinion is WordPress is made for small and medium bloggers. It's easy to setup and manage and you've even mentioned proven spam solutions for it in your reply to vord.
Not sure what criticism Discord is getting from the blog community but.. tbh, I fail to see your point. You seem to have some sort of issue with big tech but there are many, easy solutions for small to medium size blogging, Discord probably just being another one; although I never thought of Discord as a blogging platform any more than LinkedIn is.
I used to confuse them too, since they're all named too similar: Discord v. Disqus v. Discourse
OP is speaking of Disqus, an embeddable comment section.
Oops! That makes more sense.
WordPress might be fine if it’s hosted and maintained by someone else (like wordpress.com) but my experience hosting it myself was not great. It was a constant battle to keep it up to date and unexploited, especially after a couple of minor hit blogposts.
I stopped blogging for several years following that and when I eventually began again went with a static site generator and static hosting because it’s so much more trouble-free while also giving me more control than hosted WP.
I have yet to add any kind of comment system though because Disqus is easily many times heavier than the entirety of my site which feels silly and most free alternatives don’t have spam mitigation. Instead, people who have something they’d like to say email me which has worked out alright.
Simpler is very often better and this sounds like a good solution for you. I quite like it and may implement something like that myself.
Just for clarification, you say "Discord," but do you mean Disqus, which is the topic of this post? Maybe autocorrect is doing something here.
While I know Disqus mainly as a commenting platform all over the Internet, I could see it as a microblogging platform to an extent, as well.
I read Disqus wrong like a doofus!
Which is rather stupid because I do know Disqus and what it's used for. I just don't use it myself.
IMHO Wordpress commenting interface is quite simple and still looks aesthetic enough, a thousand times better than disqus or any third party providers. The only advantage with the providers is that it's free or gratis, nothing else!
Even for a static site, if you can spin up your own PHP comment script similar to WP, it should work fine. The only concern is the spam handling part. Once they start getting taking too much of your time, you'll need a third party to handle that too. Wordpress has something called Akismet plugin for that, I'm not sure what a DIY equivalent is.
Damn. I read Disqus as Discord!
In which case you may well be right but I've been out of the game for a while so probably can't really comment tbh.
No thanks, Disqus is a bad place run by bad people.