Comments now powered by Talkyard
It's been almost 9 years since I wrote this post praising Disqus and here I am to kick it to the curb. And yet even in that original post, I knew nothing would last forever. Honestly, I don't hate Disqus as a commenting platform as much as others do. However, I completely understand the multi-faceted concerns surrounding privacy, ads, and a general sense of friction when coming to just say a few words on a post of mine. Unlike others, I have no plans to ditch comments altogether, in fact, I think comments are as vital to the web ecosystem as blogging itself. However, I needed to find an alternative that would work for this site.
My requirements going in were not too grandiose:
- Needs to be open source, in other words, if push comes to fail I can DIY this and run it on my own.
- Needs to be able to import all previous comments from Disqus and cleanly map them to the associated post.
- Needs proper export options should I need to find a new system in the future.
As I was looking around for alternatives to Disqus I found a lot of fly-by-night Github repos with questionable sustainability. No shade for the developers out there doing their own thing but I'm hoping to strike a balance between "I wrote this as a Red Bull-fueled late-night bender" and "We began selling your data before you even arrived on our site. We are legion. Do not resist." One potential that kept coming up was Talkyard. They check all the boxes and seem to strike that exact balance I'm looking for in that the developer is very active on the project (I've exchanged a few emails with him in the course of this migration) but it's a paid service with open source component and feels quite stable.
So yeah, the long and short of this is that comments are now driven by Talkyard. I'm not running this on my own servers. For 3 Euro/month, it felt dirt cheap to support the developer directly rather than try to do anything on Reclaim Cloud (ok you know I tried, but it's a lot and a bit beyond my caliber). The developer assisted with converting a Disqus XML dump to JSON and importing it into Talkyard. We did run into an issue with discussion IDs not always matching up which is unfortunately likely a result of many experiments over the years with platforms using Disqus in WordPress, Anchor, and Ghost. Even on Ghost how I ran it was not always the same as the embed recommendations (and thus the IDs associated with posts) changed a bit. All that to say I'm going to have to manually go through posts to make the connection to Talkyard which already has all my comments now. I've done that as far back as 2023 and it's just some manual legwork on my end to update IDs so the old comments show back up.
I'm notably not requiring any kind of login, which is my biggest beef with built-in comments in Ghost. I get that requiring someone to have an account is probably a great barrier to spam, but it feels like a hurdle too big for something as unimportant as a random person's blog so for now the gates are open and if I need to make any changes to address spam or what have you I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. Now get in those comments and say hello!
Comments powered by Talkyard.