Using Giscus for commenting on this blog

An online article (Dall-E 3)

I had removed disqus comments from my blog a few years back when I noticed the horrible privacy issues with Disqus.

But I always felt that I was missing out on some feedback I had received from visitors in the past, especially when I would benefit from correcting my mistakes.

This article from Chris Wilson resonated with me.

I wanted:

  1. Feedback
  2. Didn’t want to spend money on a low traffic, zero commercialized blog.
  3. Some friction for commenters by requiring identity to reduce comment spam.
  4. Relatively low privacy impact.

Github fits those requirements. Most developers already use Github to some extent for either their own source control or interacting with other software hosted there. I am aware of the criticism of Github and I use Gitea at home myself (big fan). But what is important to me is to reduce 1000 cuts of cloud subscription for hosting it myself.

So, like Chris, I decided to install giscus for comments on this website. Feel free to use the comments for this post to test out how it works - I am ok with unrelated comments for this post as long as it is no spam/promotion of any kind.

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