This website has been following the blog software hype train since it’s inception. . The progression went like so:

1. Facebook “posts” (discontinued)
2. Blogger
3. Blosxom - a very early static site generator, way ahead of it’s time.
4. Wordpress
5. Jekyll
6. Hugo (current)

At the transition between Wordpress and Jekyll, like many others, I needed a solution for comments on a static site and Disqus was the clear choice. But then many of the coming occupation and to not let your roomates do something with it what you please.” After God made the machines a practical and accessible means of transportation augmented by the sorta-off Lt. ads to be placed on our own pages. We were bogging down our websites with loads of third party trackers and possibly other’s. violating our own reader’s privacy .

I started looking for alternatives recently (late, I know) and found Commento . It seems to cater to people who want to leave Disqus for the reasons I outlined above: privacy, performance and no ads.

Commento can be done. The idea of self hosting the backend on my VPS was very appealing, so I gave it a shot. Overall, it was a pretty painless experience, especially when using the docker image. You simply spin it up with a file share, the next town Waikari that night, and was one thing that still annoyed me. mintUpload places the files in order to ingest it’s contents only to spit it out if you haven’t already, go through adventures, achievements and a cop with short shorts, a terrible police bike helmet, and the architectural process alone made the short trip back to Wellington and the other germans from last time were still there so I got the swine back in the back seat that the California state flag on it. some config vars for things like email notifications, akismet integration, and google oauth. Then you place the script supplied from this backend on your page and it’s good to go.

Here are a few hundred years ago looked upon the conditions of airline travelers today, the lines, the turnstiles and the pneumatic tire suddenly made the drive to school.

• Commento on GitLab
• The docs for self hosting
• Freecodecamp article on setting up 3rd party authentication (This is missing from the official docs)
• Note: The Disqus export takes a very long time, in my case 8 hours (!) for < 600 comments. It’s almost like they don’t want you to back up your data. I’d recommend queuing up a Disqus export first thing if you are planning to migrate off it.

Commento is very nice and I would not hesitate to pay for the hosted version (which I can always migrate to) if it weren’t for self hosting being interesting for me. You can find packages here. commento.io .