Recently, I decided it was time for a major cleanup of my blog (proudly hosted on GitHub Pages!). Part of this cleanup involved rethinking my choice of commenting system—specifically, saying goodbye to Disqus.

I never liked Disqus that much anyway:

• It’s bulky and slows down my page load times.
• Visitors are required to log in before commenting, which feels cumbersome.
• Notifications about comments didn’t always arrive, making it hard for me to keep track of conversations.

With these points in mind, I searched for alternatives—something lightweight, fast, privacy-friendly, and free (or at least generous with a free tier). Luckily, there are plenty of good options around:

• Static solutions like Utterances and Giscus use GitHub Issues or Discussions. They’re developer-friendly and require minimal to no management. But commenters must use GitHub accounts, which might be restrictive.

• Fully static approaches like Staticman, which turn comments into pull requests on GitHub. No third-party services are required, providing privacy and independence, but the setup is more complicated as you’d need separate backend hosting.

• Third-party hosted options such as Cusdis and Commento: both lightweight, privacy-focused, open-source commenting services. They don’t force commenters to create an account, have a smooth modern UI, and are easy to integrate without additional infrastructure.

After comparing these options, Both Cusdis and Commento look great. RNG god tells me to choose Cusdis. Very fast intergration (5 min I guess).

So here we are—no more forcing visitors to log into Disqus, no more missed notifications. Enjoy the new Cusdis commenting system below. Feel free to test it out right here!