I always liked the concept of blog comments. I largely write for myself, but it feels strange to just see the void stare back at me.

There's Mastodon and Bluesky of course, but.. I don't really keep track of those. They feel like they're for talking about you, not to you.

This blog runs on a static site generator1.. which makes it a bit harder than back in the olden days of Wordpress.

But I like my current workflow, and, frankly, I'd like to keep it. So I'd like to find something that just slots into the existing site.

So.. what are my options?

For a long time, the standard answer would be Disqus. But they're SaaS, so that means sending all traffic to a third-party server.2 And they're pretty expensive (or serve ads). And they seem to be pushing some AI garbage. Yuck. So that's not an option.

There's also utterances, which was pretty popular for a while. It's free and open source! ..but it stores all content in a GitHub repo3, which I've been moving away from for a while at this point... So that's not it either.

So what's a girl to do? I ended up writing a Tyck, a tiny comment engine that just integrates using the venerable Server Side Includes that nginx already supports.

So that's now live, maybe give it a whirl?

1

Zola, to be precise

2

Very non-ideal, as they say. Both in terms of my personal philosophy, and from a GDPR compliance perspective.

3

It even requires users to have a GH account!