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Comment by jimnotgym | Hacker News Reader

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jimnotgym

I am happy to see an alternative to Facebook comments.

> Talk doesn’t contain any tracking, or digital surveillance.

> Talk is small — about 300kb — and lightweight

Both are an improvement over FB IMHO

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Wyatt from the Coral Project here. It's all about the news rooms owning the data of the comments, not social networks like Facebook. We're using tech like GraphQL to make the experience possible on multiple platforms through our extensible and pluggable API.

Does Mozilla have a copy of the data, e.g. does it work like Disqus?

Not at all. The software Talk [1] it installed on newsroom's infrastructure. We only provide the software the makes this all work.

[1]: http://coralproject.net/products/talk.html

Do you think the Facebook "social networking" GraphQL patent applies to Talk?

https://medium.com/@dwalsh.sdlr/using-graphql-why-facebook-n...

I realize that this could be considered lightweight by today's web standards, but to me this is still huge.

I hope that 300KB refers to the backend code size, since one of the selling points is organizations run their own version. There's no way you need 300 KB of frontend code to render HTML from a database.

Import a JS Framework or two and you'll easily blow that 300kB.

Woe be to the person still on dialup modem. 300kb on a 56k modem is around a full minute download if memory serves. Of course said modem user is probably already drowning in javascript frameworks anyway.

My point is that compared with Facebook SDK this project is tiny

I understand your point, I just hijacked your comment to voice my frustration about current trends.

I tried checking the actual size of the JS being loaded, but since the site for an article I opened made over 500 requests to load the page after I turned off add blockers I gave up. In their case, 300kB _is_ tiny.

Here's one that is of size half-tiny then :- ) another open source embedded commenting system, with different features & look, & 150 kb JS:

https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments.

I'm developing this. Still, even just 150 kb is actually a bit slow, on slow 3G connections.

The whois of the domain from which the JS is loaded shows that it is owned by wapo too. That's great, disqus always loads everything from a CDN.

Here's another open-source & ad-free & track-free alternative, 150 kb lightweight, + some unique features & look.

https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments (I'm developing it, ... submitted yesterday, no one noticed)

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