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Comment by Cyberdog | Hacker News Reader

So in order to use this, you need to host a new Node app and SQLite database on your server. Also, things like spam control are now back on you.

So why not just use a CMS or blog engine which supports traditional server-side comments? I suppose there is a case if you're hosting static HTML pages but still want them to be commentable, but how many people are doing that? I don't get the use case for this.

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Because you like everything else about the static blog (static files are easily hosted and trivial to move to other hosts or CDNs, many devs like the integration with git, you like the workflow of doing everything locally until the push to publish, good hosting solutions that scale a lot are really cheap).

If something goes wrong with the server you host (suddenly tons of visitors, some failure), only your comments are down, not your entire site, assuming the static hosting is on other infrastructure (and even if not, it's easily moved again).

Maybe you used an external service before and want to get rid of it, like the example in the article, but do not want to completely change how your blog works for this.

Part of the motivation for using a static site (especially GitHub Pages) is to eliminate the time, energy and cost of doing DevOps.

Going full DevOps just for blog comments is not great ROI. If I couldn't use Disqus/FB Comments and was forced to self-host my own blog comments on my static blog, I'd just remove blog comments altogether.

Sure, I can see why you'd make that choice (just as I know people who never would touch Disqus or FB comments).

Doesn't mean others wouldn't throw up a comment system somewhere, in the knowledge that the most important part of their site (the content) isn't affected if it doesn't keep up and they exactly do not need to invest the time and energy to "go full DevOps" for that.

I already have a static blog and like 8 non static apps on my server. If I were to add comments I'd rather host a comment server than convert my blog to something other than static files.

Part of the motivation for running your own static blog engine (as opposed to Medium) is that you believe in a decentralized internet. I used to run my own Wordpress server for a decade before I gave up dealing with the security flaws and moved to a static blog.

Sure, I could’ve just live without comments, but that’s again forcing the discussion into other „centralized“ communities like Twitter or Facebook. So I threw in the time to create and set up Schnack.js to have the best of both worlds: a static no-hazzle website with self-hosted comments.

Also I grew up in a time where virtually everyone would have self-hosted comment systems on their static self-hosted websites. Only they used to be called guestbooks then. Working on Schnack really reminded me of that magic time.

I wanted to do something like that for my static blog (and contact form for my company site), and couldn’ Find the time, so thanks to you for making this !

I’ll give it a try during holidays.

If you want some dynamic comments why not just use hypothes.is, which is about as minimal as you can get?

It is trivial to make a static blog CDN-friendly, not so much CRM like Wordpress. It is doable, but the amount of efforts is non-trivial.

In addition it improves the site security. An XSS bug in commenting code in Wordpress can allow the attacker to become the administrator for the whole site. A similar bug in commenting engine only allows the attacker to damage the comments and temporary disfigure the site with straightforward recovery.

I feel the same. I wonder if a free heroku account and a docker image of the setup would work if you really wanted this? Seems like full on DevOps is not necessary for a very self-contained simple commenting app like this if you wanted to self host with minimal cost/effort.

For people who write their own CMSes (like myself), this is hella useful. I look forward to adding this to my blog once more features get added, although I'd probably switch the database to MongoDB.

Indeed. One of the reasons disqus and the like are popular is that they take care of hosting the comments.

And having user content on a separate domain isn't a bad idea from a security pov.

Nothing's stopping you from running a self-hosted solution on a different domain.

Sure, but then you have to run a self hosted solution on another domain. It's far easier if someone else is willing to do it for you at a low cost (or even free).

According to the article, this "free" service comes at the cost of their readers privacy, not being in control of your whole blog (comments) and increased loading time because of the size/requests needed.

Seems like this would easily run on the free tier of Heroku for a blog with modest traffic.

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