That’s very cool! Why is it free though? I see that you allow users to download their data. So what’s the catch? 
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Thanks There’s no catch. I’m not completely opposed to monetizing it with a potential freemium model with custom coded features in the future but if I never do it still looks good on my portfolio / resume.
You can get threaded conversiation/replies with Staticman. You just need to implement it in your theme. Here’s an example: Comments Support • Minimo
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For people looking to host their own comments, I recently came across Mouthful.
Mouthful is a lightweight commenting server written in GO and Preact. It’s a self hosted alternative to disqus that’s ad free.
Its installation looks straightforward and since it’s written in Go there are no additional dependencies to install or manage.
Its features are:
Multiple database support(sqlite, mysql, postgres, dynamodb)
Moderation with an administration panel
Server side caching to prevent excessive database calls
Rate limiting
Honeypot feature, to prevent bots from posting comments
Migrations from existing commenting engines(isso)
Configuration - most of the features can be turned on or off, as well as customized to your preferences.
The project is recent (2 months old) and active (last commit one hour ago).
Hope this helps someone. 
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I saw this article this morning. It has a pretty ingenious solution using forms, lambda, and webhooks. I haven’t tried it out, and it may depend on some Netlify magic…but it’s worth adding to the mix.
Interesting, I do something quite similar but using Webmentions:
The diagram is similar to the whole loop diagram on that css-tricks post.
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Interesting read indeed. Thanks!
I would only like to point out that the first user comment on the article’s page about “rebuilding the site or page after every new comment is approved” misses the point. Netlify’s builds are incremental.
Very interesting indeed. Do you have some documentation on how to do that get request during build? I can see that such a capability would be very useful for a number of tasks that would otherwise need to be done dynamically.
It’s the getJSON command. You can use it get a JSON from any API uri that returns a JSON.
Ah, cool. I’ve not tried that yet. Thanks.
So with Netlify, I presume that I could have a timed rebuild process that would update automatically. Wonder what else I could do with that! 
Of course, cron + curl
What is everyone using for comments in mid-2018?
I wrote this post about quitting disqus after realizing that Disqus was killing my websites last year.
But to be honest, I haven’t found an alternative that I love.
On my WordPress sites for business and clients I still use the plain old commenting ( sometimes with Facebook comments allowed) and Akismet for spam management.
I’ve not found anything better. Even with a small, slow site like mine, spam comments are an issue that I don’t have time to deal with. Following this discussion with interest but the alternatives seem still way too complex right now and don’t provide anything in the way of spam protection.
I should say that spam comments are becoming more of an issue. Not only are there thousands of people with nothing better to do than to try and earn a little money with spam commenting but with changing laws (e.g. not bots so bot mitigations don’t work), site owners are being put under pressure again regarding the content of their sites even in comments.
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There’s of course always the possibility to implement a configurable cache timeout. I think the two approaches are complementary:
- if you need to fetch remote content as precise times, cron is your friend
- if you just need to refresh the content every now and then (and different content should have different refresh windows) then we need to implement some cache TTL of sorts
For anyone with Netlify-based sites, this is a nice little commenting system from Phil Hawksworth, who is part of the team @ Netlify.
https://jamstack-comments.netlify.com/about/
Fairly straightforward.
Yes, I like the idea of using Lambda functions to do this. But what we really need is a low-cost ML tool for comment anti-spam.
Now I don’t see any comments at all at your blog? (Did you get disappointed also at the plain old commenting thing, & FB comments?)
Did you have a look at Talkyard? How do you react to it / what do you think about it? Demo.
You wrote: “Most people don’t have the time to create an account or switch between their Disqus profiles just to comment on a blog post”
— I recently added guest login (to Talkyard) so people won’t have to create real accounts. Because yes, probably having to create a real profile, just to post a comment, can be a blocker. There’s a comment approval queue & rate limits if people start misbehaving.
Blockquote Now I don’t see any comments at all at your blog? (Did you get disappointed also at the plain old commenting thing, & FB comments?)
Yes, there are no comments on this blog post on the site.
Nobody has commented. The irony…
I like the look of Talkyard and from a few quick tests, it looks very fast.
Can you share URLs of any (non-demo) sites that have some active discussions via Talkyard?
There aren’t many blogs with Talkyard comments yet, and no active discussions so far (that I know about). People have posted … usually zero comments, to most blog posts. Or sometimes one single comment.
… I think this is how things are, for blogs in general, nowadays. And that people discuss things via Facebook and Twitter and news aggregation sites like Reddit etc, instead.
If anyone is interested in building a web & mobile app, that works a bit like Faceook and Reddit, but connects with blogs and decentralized mini communities, “all over the world” (including this Hugo community. E.g. finds interesting posts from here, & shows reply notifications from here. Plus, from your Hugo blog :- ) if any) — feel free to send me a message. I’d like to try to build such a thing me too, some time in the distant future, and maybe we cold share ideas or cooperate in the same project.
That’s exactly what Webmentions are. Have you looked into that?
Using Webmentions, I show mentions made to me and my tweets about my blog posts on Twitter, on my web site (see the concept of backfeed in Indieweb).
I can show discussions from here on my website too, if Discourse were sending Webmentions.