Show HN: I'm working on a open-source, self-hosted alternative to Disqus

djyde | 436 points

Slightly OT but if I'm ever in need of a comprehensive list of alternatives to services, I'm just going to post that I'm building one. I just knew when I saw this post that the thread would be full of preexisting projects.

dariusj18 | 3 years ago

Neat! I checked out your source code, and if there's one comment I have, it's the way you query for comments. Currently, response times are around 300-400 ms for just 79 bytes of data. That's likely because you recursively fetch nested comments from a serverless function, which potentially has to make multiple network request to talk to the database. Coincidentally, a past Disqus employee has a great write up on the faster solution (recursive CTE): https://cra.mr/2010/05/30/scaling-threaded-comments-on-djang...

Regardless, great work! Choosing Svelte to hit that 4.7kb mark is super sweet!

lawrencechen | 3 years ago

Coral is poorly advertised outside it's ecosystem, but should be considered. https://github.com/coralproject/talk

See https://docs.coralproject.net/coral/v5/integrating/cms/ to get an idea of it's use.

mey | 3 years ago

A somewhat related solution for comments is to piggyback on the Mastodon ecosystem, which I really like: https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta...

rendx | 3 years ago

I wonder how many people who are using comments don't need comments. I have seen so many places where comments are enabled but even good comments are not replied to, especially when the post is from 5 years ago.

Also, trying to ensure the correct quality of comments is time-consuming. If someone asks "Why would I use C#?", it might seem low quality and won't be published but what if someone asks "You are using C# but Go would make a lot of this easier", it might warrant publishing and even a reply but how many people really want to start a long discussion with a stranger about the merits of different languages?

lbriner | 3 years ago

I would suggest that always show on screen the label of the input, is not a good practice put the label inside the input and make it disappear when the person start typing.

Example: https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1*tjzXjhViDt3ArR1zUkFiRw.png

From: https://uxdesign.cc/best-practices-for-form-design-ff5de6ca8...

Hope can help.

pentagrama | 3 years ago

When i click on "try it now", then click the browser's back button when seeing "log in with github" I and up at https://cusdis.com/dashboard and get a 500 error page.

Tepix | 3 years ago
l3s2d | 3 years ago

Nice project!

I've been using RemarkBox for the last couple of months and like it. It's privacy respecting, hosted, pay what you want.

https://www.remarkbox.com/

yoaviram | 3 years ago

The main advantage to Disqus (and other hosted solutions) is that their spam protection applies across all comment sections. You'll never get that with an open source solution.

jedberg | 3 years ago

Other (older) projects trying to fill a similar need :

isso: https://github.com/posativ/isso

juvia: https://github.com/phusion/juvia

But cusdis looks great so far!

Jiejeing | 3 years ago

I'm late to the game, but I'm surprised that no one has mentioned StaticMan yet:

https://github.com/eduardoboucas/staticman

Just uses Git(Hub|Lab) to triage and approve comments for your static sites, like Jekyll.

taltman1 | 3 years ago

I'm maintaining a list of commenting systems [1]. It's great to see more alternatives coming up every few months. I've just updated the list with 3 new projects from this thread.

[1] https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/

darekkay | 3 years ago

I worry about the echo chambers people are subjecting themselves to when something with applicability as general as a commenting widget requires a GitHub account to sign in. That's narrowing it down to a subset of a subset of one's audience.

pwdisswordfish8 | 3 years ago

Make it decentralised, it is the new black.

m00dy | 3 years ago

Very cool! I would love to switch away but a Disqus import would be needed before we can do so.

sytse | 3 years ago

The edit box doesn't seem to indicate what sorts of markup, or "url looking thing is converted to link", etc, is available. Might be good to have a little help box to explain what's allowed/supported, even if that's just text.

Edit: I now see the "support markdown" commit. You might want a "preview" button so people can see what they have. At the moment I see only a "Post Comment" button.

Also, does it understand the concept of canonical urls so that pages that are the same one, but with different urls, share the same comments? I searched the repo for "canonical" and didn't see anything.

tyingq | 3 years ago

Cuss & diss Disqus. Loving the name.

Can I suggest you add something of an architecture diagram/flowchart od the website? Just a little something that illustrates what the frontend talks to, where the data is stored, that sort of thing?

elric | 3 years ago

Disqus -> qusDis -> cusDis -> cusdis

I hope that's not too close to the original name

barbazoo | 3 years ago

Is there a mail-based solution out there?

Kind of like a public mailbox that you send comments to, and articles get recompiled with the comments on a static blog.

Plus, it would be naturally threaded if your mailto: link includes a thread ID.

MayeulC | 3 years ago

Great! Read here why it is needed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26033052

Disqus.. the dark commenting system.

rapnie | 3 years ago

I did some back end work and intense moderation for a large scale commenting/discussion site. I would like to chat with you about the spam /moderation 'con' you have listed in the documentation. I have a hefty set of semipolished ideas in that space that I would be happy to give to someone who can actually use them. I couldn't find a way to send you an email or message. If you are interested, feel free to reach out security at myusername .net.

aviditas | 3 years ago

I tried out Disqus about 3 years ago, and found the API horrible... see SOF thread here. Might be worth doing a React wrapper to make it easy to understand how to integrate with frontend. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48653016/does-the-disqus...

hutch120 | 3 years ago

I'm a huge fan of the lightweight nature of Cusdis.

I made this walk-through video of the project inclusive the deployment to Vercel and Railway:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHr0oBIA2xA

mfts0 | 3 years ago

Looking over the source code, it pains me to see how complicated web app development has become.

transfire | 3 years ago

I created a paid version here at https://blogstreak.com but I don't think it's taking off. I am planning to add marketing blogs but let's see in a month.

rajasimon | 3 years ago

The self-host documentation returns a 404: https://cusdis.com/doc#/self-host/installation

dt3ft | 3 years ago

imho the most important part of comment systems is the formula to appeal bans. False positives are going to happen and you cant just randomly remove people from communities out of convenience.

6510 | 3 years ago

I have been tinkering about the idea of building open source disqus alternative for few months now. I guess I missed the train already:D Do you have any plans to monetise this?

heofizzy | 3 years ago

Glosa, with its Disqus importer, has been around for a long time. https://github.com/glosa

tanrax | 3 years ago

I love this project and I'd love it more if there was a discription on landing page about WHY it is privacy-friendly (as it seems to be one of the greatest benefits).

eatthatpie | 3 years ago

Integrate it with ghost. There aren’t many options for us building communities on Ghost for commenting. Cove.chat but the experience is less than premium IMO.

EvanKRob | 3 years ago

Cool! I would like to try this out in my blog, can this be integrated with statically generated pages using jekyll?

setum | 3 years ago

Nice project but you should probably change the name of the service IMO.

staticelf | 3 years ago

What's the license? I didn't see it on the repo.

toomanyducks | 3 years ago

Great use case for Svelte! How are you liking it so far?

zapt02 | 3 years ago

Nice! Congrats, looks amazing

ochronus | 3 years ago

self hosting + open source. kudos, good man

spamtarget | 3 years ago

Very interesting, I've been looking for this.

FoohanFoo | 3 years ago

My friend in SF is working on https://reactivecomments.com/

It's a drop-in comment service in the cloud based on Remark42

dlcrc | 3 years ago

How can I use it on the posts in my blog hosted at GitHub pages? I use Jekyll to build my blog.

Do you have a tutorial for that?

truth_ | 3 years ago

I wrote about a similar issue, I give you the link to my site. <a href="https://sattamatkaofficial.net/">sattamatka</a>

Mubashirjanijha | 3 years ago

Change the name.

pgt | 3 years ago

This looks interesting.

I browse the WWW without JavaScript and this bricks many comment systems. Are you planning to make a widget without reliance on JavaScript?

Dort | 3 years ago

Not to put you down, but I think you should differentiate yourself well from Discourse (https://github.com/discourse/discourse), as it is pretty popular with the open source communities.

O_H_E | 3 years ago