I used to embed Disqus in my site, but wasn't really happy with its centralised nature (plus it was far slower and bloated than anything else I had; generally a few KB of static HTML with "motherfucking-website" aesthetics).
I like the idea of clients subscribing to feeds, and syndicating comments with parent URIs, into an aggregated view; and there being discovery services, all convention, like XMPP. This is all very 1998 like LiveJournal.
I'm thinking the only? way to deal with clever spammers, that's really going to work, is to manually review the first N comments by each new commenter, and only approve the comments, if they add value to the blog post. Once someone has been able to add value to the blog post 3? 5? times (e.g. provided more useful info or thoughts, or asked on-topic questions whose answers = good for others to know too) — then the likelihood that that person is a spammer is maybe 0.01%, ok to auto approve his/her comments hereafter. I actually built such blog commenting software, link in my profile.
https://indieweb.org/Webmention
(I also find it fascinating but a little concerning that the "IndieWeb" movement and the community around ActivityPub seem to be inventing very similar wheels, either without being aware of one another's work or without much apparent interest in working together.)
So far I haven't yet (hope that didn't change) needed to do any manual spam cleanup. If I ever need to, I hope that it's as simple as deleting such mentions from WebMention.io.