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One of the biggest benefits of Disqus is the size of their network. I'm already logged into Disqus and thus can easily reply to someone, comment, upvote and share. When I go to sites that expect me to make a new account, provide my email to a stranger, or give them auth via my Twitter account I likely won't bother at all. Disqus also offers a full account export (or they have in the past, I haven't checked lately) if you ever really feel like you want to go self-host.

The hypothetical self-hosted version would be a perfect candidate for OpenID auth I guess ...

Vanilla has a plugin to do this, but the link seems to be broken at the moment. I'll contact them.

http://vanillaforums.org/addon/embedvanilla-plugin

Me too. Juvia is the closest I've seen: https://github.com/phusion/juvia