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Commento: Open-Source Disqus Alternative
- js4ever 8y agohttps://gitlab.com/commento/commento https://gitlab.com/commento/commento
- m3adow 8y agoCommento is hosted on Gitlab now: https://gitlab.com/commento/commento https://gitlab.com/commento/commento The Github page is only a mirror.
- js4ever 8y agoYes sorry about that, it took me few seconds to notice it and updat the link in my message
- kristerv 8y agoa much better link, thanks!
- adtac 8y agoLol it's so surreal seeing your project when you're randomly browsing the frontpage. Anyway, creator here, AMA! >adtac has succeeded in reducing download to just 11 kB and isn’t done yet Someone raised an issue to support Brotli in Commento (which I wasn't aware of) [1] and I did a quick test; it'd decrease the JS+CSS payload even further to under 8-9 KB. Nearly all modern browsers support Brotli [2], so I'm really looking forward to this. I now realise this could be a modern take on the famous C10K problem, just with a different meaning: developing web services with under 10 kilobytes of payload :) [1] https://gitlab.com/commento/commento/issues/125 https://gitlab.com/commento/commento/issues/125 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotli#Browser_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotli#Browser_support
- akuji1993 8y agoDo you see any issues with scaling in this project? I'd be very interested to know what you chose as backend architecture and how you handle so many requests parallel to each other, as I've struggled to build a good multi-threaded express backend in the past, would be awesome to hear some other stories. Do you think your service can handle a massive surge, let's say a really big player would pick you up? Edit: Also really surprised about your pricing strategy. What if somebody wants to surpass the 50k pageviews? Wouldn't it be better to at least give those another tier?
- adtac 8y agoI've done some basic benchmarks and it has scaled pretty well. Mostly thanks to the excellent performance and scalability that comes from choosing Go and Postgres. IMO backend servers are where Go excels. I'm planning on adding Redis support soon enough so that sudden spikes would have little impact on the database server (which is nearly always the bottleneck, unless you're compute-intensive, which isn't the case with Commento). So that if you suddenly get a few hundred thousand visitors, most API responses are cached and only a fraction will actually require disk access. Like reddit does, where it'll temporarily say there N comments, but when you open the page, there wouldn't be that many. A few seconds of inconsistency is a fine compromise in the comments world. Of course, Redis isn't going to magically make everything faster, so I'll have to be careful with where I introduce it. Optimise for the common case and all that. I'm still in uni, and I've never actually worked on large-throughput, high-scalability stuff before, so all this has been a great learning experience for me. If you have any suggestions or war stories that might be relevant, I'm all ears!
- akuji1993 8y agoI'm by no means an expert in web backend architecture, but what you have done seems pretty solid to me with my limited knowledge. We've been mostly working with Express, that's why I asked to hear some feedback about how others have done. And also, very well done! Your software seems to work very fine, a lot of thought already went into scaling and general stability of the backend. And for me, as fullstack working for a design company, your website layout and design is pretty good. If you didn't have help with that, kudos to you, good work, especially for someone still in college :) Edit: Website performs pretty good in a Lighthouse audit, apart from Accessibility features.
- kristerv 8y agoYou have a "Your Price" option? Love it! https://commento.io/pricing https://commento.io/pricing
- StavrosK 8y agoMy experience with comments on my site has not been great. My general sense is that, beyond the occasional "thank you", which I appreciate but which is not very actionable, the best discourse happened by email anyway, and comments were mostly by people who wanted me to solve their problems for them. I made my email address even more prominent and disabled comments on my site after realizing it would be a net improvement.
- hnarn 8y agoIt wouldn't be HN if there wasn't a comment pointing out why the whole project is useless. I for one appreciate there being a lightweight alternative to proprietary, locked-in, cloud based services like Disqus, even if I don't personally and currently need a comment field on my website.
- chronogram 8y agoStrange comment? There wasn’t even mention of the project being useless.
- mercer 8y agoIt wouldn't be hacker news if there wasn't eventually a comment pointing out that there's always a comment pointing out <x>. It's fascinating to see this happen on both HN and Reddit, quite often even before 'comment pointing out <x>' is even posted. This phenomenon reminds me a bit of the annoying fallacy-fallacy, or how any discussion involving -isms (capitalism, socialism) cannot be had without either or both parties pre-emptively defending against being accused of, say, the no-true-scotsman fallacy. I've been wondering if this is a 'new' thing, or if we've always been having these increasingly meta conversations, or if perhaps I'm just getting old and tired of it.
- chronogram 8y agoOr maybe it’s because of internet points? Do you also see it happen in real life?
- pictur 8y agohttps://github.com/posativ/isso https://github.com/posativ/isso
- Chazprime 8y agoHonestly, Disqus has been so unhelpful with fixing issues (such as users not being able to post comments from iPhones) that this might be worth a look.
- vanderZwan 8y agoThere was some discussion about adding comments to beta.observable.hq a while back[0][1]. One of the offered solutions was to embed disqus into a notebook manually[2]. Could you do that with Commento as well? [0] https://talk.observablehq.com/t/comments-on-notebooks/1662 https://talk.observablehq.com/t/comments-on-notebooks/1662 [1] https://talk.observablehq.com/t/let-s-talk-about-observable-suggestions/1675 https://talk.observablehq.com/t/let-s-talk-about-observable-... [2] https://observablehq.com/@bumbeishvili/comments-on-notebooks https://observablehq.com/@bumbeishvili/comments-on-notebooks
- adtac 8y agoYep, looks doable. All you need to do is insert two tags: a <script> and a <div>. You can also disable auto loading and manually trigger loading comments (see `data-auto-init` in the docs [1]). [1] https://docs.commento.io/configuration/frontend/ https://docs.commento.io/configuration/frontend/
- unixhero 8y agoCool name!
- adtac 8y agoFunny story behind that. I originally thought the name was Latin for "comments". Naming things is hard, so I figured I'd just take the easy way out and translate from a dead language. I realised it was Italian only months later lol. Google Translate failed me.
- unixhero 8y agoAnd Spanish & Portuguese more or less
- Golfkid2Gadfly 8y agoOnly I can't open this page?
- m0d0nne11 8y agoCount yourself lucky. Hoorah! for any alternative to Disqus, of course, but OMG the layout of their WWW page is heinously awful example of what can happen when children are permitted to do CSS.
- hawos 8y agoThe actual site for the project is https://commento.io/ https://commento.io/. But you're right, the site in the op is super ugly.
- orkon 8y agoCool project! I am also creating a similar product https://just-comments.com/ https://just-comments.com/ It's great to see so many alternatives to be created recently.
- zimpenfish 8y agoThis has reminded me to enable it on my blog (temporary testing). Thanks @adtac for creating it!
- StavrosK 8y agoI made a comment below about my negative experience with comments but forgot to mention an important detail: I took down my comments section because of spam. I had found your solution back when I was researching comment systems, and it looked (and still does look) great! I especially like the clean UI and tree-style comments. However, the big issue for me is how it handles spam. What sort of tools are there to save me from spending time moderating comments? Even something as simple as "initially hide comments that contain URLs" would go a long way towards removing lots of spam.
- ykevinator 8y agoThis is great. Is disqus still in business?
- cabalamat 8y agoI note that putting lines of text between ```...``` can be used to put them in a monospaced font. This is useful when discussing programming, as one can include excerpts of code. To do this in Reddit, you have to prefix each line by 4 spaces, which is hard to do because the comment box doesn't use a monospaced font. Maybe Commento could have an option of a monospaced font for the comment box?
- aboutruby 8y agoReddit supports ``` BTW. You are thinking of StackOverflow probably (which is very annoying). Extra bonus points to sites like Github for supporting ```language-name, e.g. ```js / ```ruby / etc.
- rplnt 8y agoIt's just equivalent to `this` though, it doesn't do newlines or preserve spaces.
- aboutruby 8y ago`this` is for inline code, ``` this ``` is for code blocks. https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet#code https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheats...
- cabalamat 8y agoHow does the spam filtering work? Is it just Akismet, or is there something else you do locally?
- darekkay 8y agoI've summarized many ways to include comments on a static site in my blog post [1]. It's great to see how many alternatives are around. [1] https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/ https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/
- born2discover 8y agoHow this compares to Isso [1]? [1](https://posativ.org/isso/ https://posativ.org/isso/)
- Mariehane 8y ago> Even compared to other open source Disqus alternatives, such as Isso and Schnack, Commento is much faster and requires less download data and RAM. If you click on the link, there is also a table comparing Commento, Isso and Schnack
- chiefalchemist 8y agoKudos! And nice to see you're using GitLab as well. Not to get off topic but my theory is, something like this is one of the reason why Automattic's / WordPress' recent Gutenberg efforts were misguided. That is, it's not only about the content (of the individual node sites / blogs) but (in a networked / graph world) also the importance of the connections between the nodes, as well as the participation of third-parties (i.e., those leaving comments). Long to short, commenting and connecting could result in an (informal social) network (of sorts). With WP powering ~30% of the web, laying the ground work for such a graph could have been revolutionary. Content __and__ connections. Instead, they went with Gutenberg (and imho missed a massive opportunity to move away from the dated silo-based content model). p.s. If Commento can (easily) work with the current copy of static site generators, what would be worth mentioning somewhere in your marketing / feature / benefits copy. Also, since Disqus is a pseudo social network, how would Commento work if the same instance were used across multiple sites / blogs? In such a situation, could Commento be used as a proxy-network among the sites that share a given instance?
- StavrosK 8y agoActually, it would be great if comments had ActivityPub integration. Then you could comment on articles from your Mastodon account.
- prophesi 8y agoAnother kudos to the project, adtac! A few days ago, I self-hosted Commento to slowly replace Disqus on my sites. It was pretty painless to get the release binaries working on a little $5 Digital Ocean droplet, and get SMTP + Google OAuth configured. To keep my page loads sane when I used Disqus, I had to delay the Disqus scripts from loading until the user hit a "Load Comments" button. It's nice that Commento comes with that sort of functionality right out of the gate, along with the ability to pass in a CSS file to override the styling.
- filesystemdude 8y agoI see on Commento.io it explicitly mentions being able to import from Disqus comments, but the "Import from a different service" is behind a signup wall. Rather than signing up for a service that may or may not work for my site, I'm curious, does it allow importing from existing native Drupal and/or WordPress commenting systems? That's my biggest pain point right now. Exposing public login to my CMS is a security risk (see: plugins/modules with permission escalation bugs) and frankly a pain I don't want to manage anymore. Migrating old comments to a new system is preferable to keeping the legacy comments system (and user accounts) in place while maintaining a second system on top of it for new comments.
- filesystemdude 8y agoRelated (if the creator is still around): Is there a roadmap/timeline for SSO?
- adtac 8y agoI plan on implementing SSO for the next release (v1.7.0), but I've been a bit busy with school work for the past week or so. Still about ~2 weeks away, by my estimate.
- filesystemdude 8y agoOh wow, great. I'm used to roadmaps and software planning cycles in months or years so "weeks" is probably before I could even get somebody to open an email to start thinking about this. :)
- adtac 8y agoImporting from Wordpress isn't officially supported yet, but others have found workarounds. One person imported their Wordpress comments into Disqus and then imported that into Commento. While native support within Commento would be infinitely better, I thought I'd mention this for the time being. I'll consider this comment as a vote for native wordpress import support :)
- foxhop 8y agoI'm actively bootstrapping an alternative to Disqus called Remarkbox (https://www.remarkbox.com https://www.remarkbox.com). It's a real struggle to get people to actually make the switch.
- morningmoon 8y agoInstead of using another data silo, consider webmentions. Post a reply on your own blog with rel=“reply-to” and send a webmention notifying the author, who uses a plugin or webmention service to display replies. It’s decentralized web comments. See indieweb.org for more information.
- trextrex 8y agoI've used a similar solution called TalkYard [1] which provides a interesting combination of commenting and forums, and has super-helpful support. [1] https://www.talkyard.io/ https://www.talkyard.io/
- everybodyknows 8y agoFrom: https://gitlab.com/commento/commento https://gitlab.com/commento/commento > ... half a second increase in page load time results in a 20% decrease in engagement and site traffic. An intriguing stat. Wonder if the 20% figure is specific to new visitors, who have never seen the site before?
- throw7 8y agodang. requires javascript.
- mintplant 8y agoThe demo page locks up for ~5 seconds before the comments appear. I wouldn't call this "lightweight".
- adtac 8y ago500+ comments and 5k+ page loads in the last few hours, but it turns out the backend was still pretty fast. It was the JavaScript that dynamically generated the comments web page that added a couple of seconds of delay. Looks like I know where to look for performance improvements next :)
- dberhane 8y agoCoral Talk commenting system is a good alternative: https://coralproject.net/talk/ https://coralproject.net/talk/
- fareesh 8y agoWhat are some competitors to Disqus re: hosted comments? What are the challenges with implementing one? Does Disqus store the comments against a url? What happens if you add some nonsensical GET parameters? Do the comments disappear?
- tracker1 8y agoVery cool as an alternative... the link at the top though, I thought it was like 1997 all over again. I'm glad to see alternatives... Though, I kind of miss when newsgroups and BBSes were more popular.
- tracker1 8y agoSuggested a feature on GH project. Would be cool to see an extension for this, similar to dissenter, that could inject related comments, particularly for websites that don't even have comments.
- dang 8y agoUrl changed from https://www.256kilobytes.com/content/show/4957/what-is-commento-the-open-source-disqus-alternative https://www.256kilobytes.com/content/show/4957/what-is-comme..., which points to this.
- dang 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19210697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19210697 This is the second time this account has submitted an article about a project that had major attention on HN a short time earlier. If this is with the idea of promoting your blog here, that is not the way. What we want is interesting content that hasn't been seen recently or (better still) ever.
- 40four 8y agoTo be fair, the person who posted this instance is not the author of the library/old article you linked. I was wondering why this suddenly disappeared from the front page. I guess it's possible they are doubling dipping with accounts? If not, they can't really help if someone else liked it and shared again. Anywho... looks fantastic, I'm certainly interested in trying this out! Speaks to the interest this project is gaining that it rose to the top twice! As someone who missed the post a few weeks ago, I am very happy to have caught this one.
- dang 8y agoSubmissions can count as dupes when they cover the same story. The story here is substantially the same as 19210697, and the pattern I was trying to pointing out is visible at https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=August-Garcia https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=August-Garcia. (It has nothing to do with the creators of this project or the other one, but yes there has been more than one form of double dipping.) I agree that it is a cool project! Marking this post a dupe isn't to deny that. It's just that front page real estate is the scarcest resource on HN. More explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19103247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19103247. Not seeing all the cool things that show up on HN is a problem all of us have. One thing we made to try to mitigate this is https://news.ycombinator.com/front https://news.ycombinator.com/front, which you can get to by clicking 'past' in the top bar.
- 40four 8y agoOkay, I see what you're saying. Yeah, your updated response is more clear. I was confused before, but you are actually addressing August-Garcia. For sure seems like they are trying to capitalize on popular posts, and driving traffic to 256k website is clearly the goal. I'm definitely not a fan of this behavior & have ranted about similar activities in the past... lol Also, props to the 'past' feature. Great idea! I'm a big fan. Thanks for all the hard work!