As promised, I’ve switched the site’s comment system from Disqus to utteranc.es. It ended up being pretty simple to do in Nikola. If I’m correct about how this is supposed to work, comments on the site will now appear as issues on the site’s repo. Of course, I would love to test out how this works :)
The reason I switched away from Disqus was their pretty horrid privacy record, for which a quick websearch will provide ample sources. Utterances is cleverly built around GitHub issues, and while it does require a GitHub account, I think it really is the lesser evil in this case.
Admittedly, I do still feel a little queasy about this. While GitHub does provide repositories for various, definitely programming lite repositories, I can’t help but think that this takes advantage of a resource given freely in ways that are not entirely as-intended-by-providers.
Take Travis CI, for example. It was a great service, the first project I’m aware of that worked with a “completely free online testing, for every commit, for every open source project out there” model. And, well, they got bought out a few years ago; last year was the year when the new owners (as I suspect) tried to plug the money sink and introduce crippling limits, and a lot of open source projects had to migrate away. I don’t know of a single one that still uses Travis, and I fully expect the paid version to go out of business soon.
Tragedy of the commons, a little?
But you can’t solve all problems everywhere at the same time, or at least I haven’t yet found a way to. So, for now, utteranc.es it is!