Many years ago, when I moved my blog from WordPress to Hugo, I was very pleased to find Disqus as a way to still have comments on a statically generated site. Today, however, I have completely removed Disqus from this site.
It started with a friend posting a screenshot of my site on Slack with no comment:
Even though he didn’t say a word, I immediately got the point. There was a weird disconnect between the footer on my post saying I don’t track you, and then right after it is a giant Disqus widget, which most certainly does track you.
I mentally pushed back and got defensive for about 30 seconds before realizing he was right. True, Disqus isn’t anywhere near the giant Google is, so maybe it was slightly less bad to leave them in place. And I liked the idea of someone being able to share a comment. I never got a lot of comments, but the ones I got were mostly encouraging and interesting.
I did a quick search (yes, on Google - they’re tracking me, not you, so it’s cool) on “Disqus privacy concerns” and found this article as one of the first results. That sealed the decision for me, and today I’m removing Disqus from this site.
I’m looking at commenting alternatives and would love some feedback. If you’ve used a self-hosted, ideally serverless, solution for blog comments, please let me know. And in the meantime, if you have any comments, mention me on Twitter. Yes, they’re tracking you too, but I doubt you’re signing up for Twitter just to give me feedback on this post, so that’s on you, not me.