Show HN: Commento: Lightweight, open source, tracking-free alternative to Disqus

Nice, that demo loaded pretty fast even with a lot of comments :)

How do I get notified when someone else replies my comment?

With so much going on about instant articles (or whatever FB calls them), and some institutions pausing, and thinking if its worth handing over their content (often for free) to these external entities - whose goals may/may not be in alignment, I make a prediction:

* In 5 years time, large organizations (e.g. NY Times) will look far more into self-hosted, often open sourced alternatives. Maybe now, they post to twitter, soon they'll refer users to their own mastodon instance. Now, orgs host comments on disqus, in the future self-hosted platforms like Commento will be used. In some ways, it will go back to the independent way in which things operated back in the late 90s/early 2000s; though hopefully better in other ways. That's my prediction.

For static sites, a service that takes comments and pushes them to the source repo for the site (or an extra comment-only repo for security and build-performance) could also be interesting.

For context, the "load times" we're talking about in the context of Disqus, at least the ones given in the articles I've read, is about 3 seconds. What's more, the javascript is below the fold, so you've already read the site content before seeing the unloaded comment section anyways.

I find it very hard to get worked up about 200k and 3 seconds of nonblocking load.

The tracking is of more immediate concern, but you also have to make a choice as a site owner:

1. Host your own comments. Nobody does this anymore because nobody likes registering for every site out there. You can have anonymous commenting, but ++ abuse. Either way, spam concerns are completely on your shoulders, and you still have to moderate.

2. Shell out to Disqus or similar. People get to log in with the credentials they already have (and don't have to log in at all if they have cookies from using another Disqus site), moderation is still a thing, but spam is much less of a problem.

3. Not have comments at all. An increasingly popular option.

Would prefer Mastodon/GNUSocial over that.

At this point I'm not making anything and I have poking at the idea on the side for 3 years. I'm currently collecting interest by allowing people to register for the beta.

I wouldn't say a flat-rate is exactly correct. Some sites receive tens of thousands of comments on a single article. Others, 5 or 10. The overhead on the service is more likely a better determinant, such as bandwidth and performance requirements for hosting. If SiteA uses 95% of your traffic and SiteB uses 5%, and your overall costs are 200 FakeUnits, you ought to be charging in respect to usage. Starting it at a price that wouldn't impact you negatively would be a good idea, and making it scalable would be even best. I'm moreover just throwing out ideas and thoughts though, I'm no VC or business expert myself, just someone who hosts servers for fun.

Disqus is also paid or supported by ads: https://disqus.com/pricing/

Exactly. Thanks!

I'd say put in an ODBC driver. It gets you support for a lot of databases right out the gate, especially if you keep things to a relatively simple subset. That way, someone already running a postgresql or mysql database can plug things in and not need to track another place data is stored.

Single insert per transaction is slow with sqlite, but slow is sort of relative. It would be probably be 10 to 80 inserts per second or so, a little faster if you turn off synchronous writes in sqlite.

I would guess most use cases for this relatively simple comment software wouldn't be expecting that many comments anyway.

An agnostic data layer should probably go on your list, but I imagine other stuff would be higher on the list...like a captcha. Spam will likely be the top issue long before performance.

I've been hearing murmurs about it for a while now, I think it's a great idea but thus far it's lacked sufficient business buy-in to gain traction.

I've mentioned it a few times; I think it's pretty important because it has a bunch of ideas which are our last best hope to prevent the centralisation of the Internet.

Some of their proposals, taken together, could enable people to emulate what Facebook offers, from their own servers.

I'm not 100% onboard with all their ideas, and a few just seem wrong, but all in all I think that they're exciting and important.

The new no Captcha Recaptcha should help https://security.googleblog.com/2014/12/are-you-robot-introd...