This is the second time this account has submitted an article about a project that had major attention on HN a short time earlier. If this is with the idea of promoting your blog here, that is not the way. What we want is interesting content that hasn't been seen recently or (better still) ever.
To be fair, the person who posted this instance is not the author of the library/old article you linked. I was wondering why this suddenly disappeared from the front page. I guess it's possible they are doubling dipping with accounts? If not, they can't really help if someone else liked it and shared again.
Anywho... looks fantastic, I'm certainly interested in trying this out! Speaks to the interest this project is gaining that it rose to the top twice! As someone who missed the post a few weeks ago, I am very happy to have caught this one.
Lol it's so surreal seeing your project when you're randomly browsing the frontpage. Anyway, creator here, AMA!
>adtac has succeeded in reducing download to just 11 kB and isn’t done yet
Someone raised an issue to support Brotli in Commento (which I wasn't aware of) [1] and I did a quick test; it'd decrease the JS+CSS payload even further to under 8-9 KB. Nearly all modern browsers support Brotli [2], so I'm really looking forward to this.
I now realise this could be a modern take on the famous C10K problem, just with a different meaning: developing web services with under 10 kilobytes of payload :)
All modern browsers support it, so you'd think it would be an easy win. The top nginx search is an official looking Google project which is long abandoned and doesn't support current versions of the library. There's an official nginx module which is commercial, and then finally there's a supported fork that that sits on about page three of Google.
Shared hosts don't generally support it. AWS Cloudfront doesn't support it, along with several other CDNs. Big + to Cloudflare for proper support.
It reduced my bundle sizes measurably. We all hate bloat and want to reduce bundles, but there seems to be a community inertia around mass deployment.
Do you see any issues with scaling in this project? I'd be very interested to know what you chose as backend architecture and how you handle so many requests parallel to each other, as I've struggled to build a good multi-threaded express backend in the past, would be awesome to hear some other stories.
Do you think your service can handle a massive surge, let's say a really big player would pick you up?
Edit: Also really surprised about your pricing strategy. What if somebody wants to surpass the 50k pageviews? Wouldn't it be better to at least give those another tier?
That's pretty cool. Last I checked on my own site Disqus downloaded 1.3 MBs of bunch of stuff, which I think is just ridiculous. After caching it's only 2 KBs but it still bothers me - what in the world it's downloading? main.js seems to be 1.2 MBs and the main culprit. EDIT: well that was the ungzipped size, 263 KBs gzipped the CSS was larger with 353 KBs. But however, it works and has a free-tier so I guess it'll do. Maybe one day I'll try this out, but for now I can't be bothered with self-hosting.
My experience with comments on my site has not been great. My general sense is that, beyond the occasional "thank you", which I appreciate but which is not very actionable, the best discourse happened by email anyway, and comments were mostly by people who wanted me to solve their problems for them.
I made my email address even more prominent and disabled comments on my site after realizing it would be a net improvement.
I just remembered an important detail but I can't edit my parent comment to update: The reason I disabled comments was that I got lots of spam, and it wasn't worth spending time removing the spam comments for the few useful ones I got.
It wouldn't be HN if there wasn't a comment pointing out why the whole project is useless. I for one appreciate there being a lightweight alternative to proprietary, locked-in, cloud based services like Disqus, even if I don't personally and currently need a comment field on my website.
On this note, what are some examples of comments providing considerable value?
I can think of: comments in torrent trackers, where comments sometimes provide useful information; and, if this even counts, forum sites, like Reddit or HN, where comments host discussions.
Kudos! And nice to see you're using GitLab as well.
Not to get off topic but my theory is, something like this is one of the reason why Automattic's / WordPress' recent Gutenberg efforts were misguided.
That is, it's not only about the content (of the individual node sites / blogs) but (in a networked / graph world) also the importance of the connections between the nodes, as well as the participation of third-parties (i.e., those leaving comments).
Long to short, commenting and connecting could result in an (informal social) network (of sorts). With WP powering ~30% of the web, laying the ground work for such a graph could have been revolutionary. Content __and__ connections.
Instead, they went with Gutenberg (and imho missed a massive opportunity to move away from the dated silo-based content model).
p.s. If Commento can (easily) work with the current copy of static site generators, what would be worth mentioning somewhere in your marketing / feature / benefits copy.
Also, since Disqus is a pseudo social network, how would Commento work if the same instance were used across multiple sites / blogs? In such a situation, could Commento be used as a proxy-network among the sites that share a given instance?
I see on Commento.io it explicitly mentions being able to import from Disqus comments, but the "Import from a different service" is behind a signup wall.
Rather than signing up for a service that may or may not work for my site, I'm curious, does it allow importing from existing native Drupal and/or WordPress commenting systems?
That's my biggest pain point right now. Exposing public login to my CMS is a security risk (see: plugins/modules with permission escalation bugs) and frankly a pain I don't want to manage anymore. Migrating old comments to a new system is preferable to keeping the legacy comments system (and user accounts) in place while maintaining a second system on top of it for new comments.
Importing from Wordpress isn't officially supported yet, but others have found workarounds. One person imported their Wordpress comments into Disqus and then imported that into Commento. While native support within Commento would be infinitely better, I thought I'd mention this for the time being. I'll consider this comment as a vote for native wordpress import support :)
I note that putting lines of text between ```...``` can be used to put them in a monospaced font.
This is useful when discussing programming, as one can include excerpts of code. To do this in Reddit, you have to prefix each line by 4 spaces, which is hard to do because the comment box doesn't use a monospaced font.
Maybe Commento could have an option of a monospaced font for the comment box?
Reddit supports ``` BTW. You are thinking of StackOverflow probably (which is very annoying). Extra bonus points to sites like Github for supporting ```language-name, e.g. ```js / ```ruby / etc.
There was some discussion about adding comments to beta.observable.hq a while back[0][1]. One of the offered solutions was to embed disqus into a notebook manually[2]. Could you do that with Commento as well?
Yep, looks doable. All you need to do is insert two tags: a <script> and a <div>. You can also disable auto loading and manually trigger loading comments (see `data-auto-init` in the docs [1]).
A few days ago, I self-hosted Commento to slowly replace Disqus on my sites. It was pretty painless to get the release binaries working on a little $5 Digital Ocean droplet, and get SMTP + Google OAuth configured.
To keep my page loads sane when I used Disqus, I had to delay the Disqus scripts from loading until the user hit a "Load Comments" button. It's nice that Commento comes with that sort of functionality right out of the gate, along with the ability to pass in a CSS file to override the styling.
Honestly, Disqus has been so unhelpful with fixing issues (such as users not being able to post comments from iPhones) that this might be worth a look.
Instead of using another data silo, consider webmentions. Post a reply on your own blog with rel=“reply-to” and send a webmention notifying the author, who uses a plugin or webmention service to display replies.
It’s decentralized web comments. See indieweb.org for more information.
[+] [-] dang|7 years ago|reply
This is the second time this account has submitted an article about a project that had major attention on HN a short time earlier. If this is with the idea of promoting your blog here, that is not the way. What we want is interesting content that hasn't been seen recently or (better still) ever.
[+] [-] 40four|7 years ago|reply
Anywho... looks fantastic, I'm certainly interested in trying this out! Speaks to the interest this project is gaining that it rose to the top twice! As someone who missed the post a few weeks ago, I am very happy to have caught this one.
[+] [-] adtac|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adtac|7 years ago|reply
>adtac has succeeded in reducing download to just 11 kB and isn’t done yet
Someone raised an issue to support Brotli in Commento (which I wasn't aware of) [1] and I did a quick test; it'd decrease the JS+CSS payload even further to under 8-9 KB. Nearly all modern browsers support Brotli [2], so I'm really looking forward to this.
I now realise this could be a modern take on the famous C10K problem, just with a different meaning: developing web services with under 10 kilobytes of payload :)
[1] https://gitlab.com/commento/commento/issues/125
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotli#Browser_support
[+] [-] technion|7 years ago|reply
All modern browsers support it, so you'd think it would be an easy win. The top nginx search is an official looking Google project which is long abandoned and doesn't support current versions of the library. There's an official nginx module which is commercial, and then finally there's a supported fork that that sits on about page three of Google.
Shared hosts don't generally support it. AWS Cloudfront doesn't support it, along with several other CDNs. Big + to Cloudflare for proper support.
It reduced my bundle sizes measurably. We all hate bloat and want to reduce bundles, but there seems to be a community inertia around mass deployment.
[+] [-] kawsper|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akuji1993|7 years ago|reply
Edit: Also really surprised about your pricing strategy. What if somebody wants to surpass the 50k pageviews? Wouldn't it be better to at least give those another tier?
[+] [-] tekkk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BeetleB|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orkon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simplehuman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|7 years ago|reply
I made my email address even more prominent and disabled comments on my site after realizing it would be a net improvement.
[+] [-] StavrosK|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnarn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmos62|7 years ago|reply
I can think of: comments in torrent trackers, where comments sometimes provide useful information; and, if this even counts, forum sites, like Reddit or HN, where comments host discussions.
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|7 years ago|reply
Not to get off topic but my theory is, something like this is one of the reason why Automattic's / WordPress' recent Gutenberg efforts were misguided.
That is, it's not only about the content (of the individual node sites / blogs) but (in a networked / graph world) also the importance of the connections between the nodes, as well as the participation of third-parties (i.e., those leaving comments).
Long to short, commenting and connecting could result in an (informal social) network (of sorts). With WP powering ~30% of the web, laying the ground work for such a graph could have been revolutionary. Content __and__ connections.
Instead, they went with Gutenberg (and imho missed a massive opportunity to move away from the dated silo-based content model).
p.s. If Commento can (easily) work with the current copy of static site generators, what would be worth mentioning somewhere in your marketing / feature / benefits copy.
Also, since Disqus is a pseudo social network, how would Commento work if the same instance were used across multiple sites / blogs? In such a situation, could Commento be used as a proxy-network among the sites that share a given instance?
[+] [-] StavrosK|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darekkay|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/
[+] [-] filesystemdude|7 years ago|reply
Rather than signing up for a service that may or may not work for my site, I'm curious, does it allow importing from existing native Drupal and/or WordPress commenting systems?
That's my biggest pain point right now. Exposing public login to my CMS is a security risk (see: plugins/modules with permission escalation bugs) and frankly a pain I don't want to manage anymore. Migrating old comments to a new system is preferable to keeping the legacy comments system (and user accounts) in place while maintaining a second system on top of it for new comments.
[+] [-] adtac|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] filesystemdude|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] js4ever|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m3adow|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristerv|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foxhop|7 years ago|reply
It's a real struggle to get people to actually make the switch.
[+] [-] born2discover|7 years ago|reply
[1](https://posativ.org/isso/)
[+] [-] Mariehane|7 years ago|reply
If you click on the link, there is also a table comparing Commento, Isso and Schnack
[+] [-] cabalamat|7 years ago|reply
This is useful when discussing programming, as one can include excerpts of code. To do this in Reddit, you have to prefix each line by 4 spaces, which is hard to do because the comment box doesn't use a monospaced font.
Maybe Commento could have an option of a monospaced font for the comment box?
[+] [-] aboutruby|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rplnt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vanderZwan|7 years ago|reply
[0] https://talk.observablehq.com/t/comments-on-notebooks/1662
[1] https://talk.observablehq.com/t/let-s-talk-about-observable-...
[2] https://observablehq.com/@bumbeishvili/comments-on-notebooks
[+] [-] adtac|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://docs.commento.io/configuration/frontend/
[+] [-] trextrex|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.talkyard.io/
[+] [-] prophesi|7 years ago|reply
A few days ago, I self-hosted Commento to slowly replace Disqus on my sites. It was pretty painless to get the release binaries working on a little $5 Digital Ocean droplet, and get SMTP + Google OAuth configured.
To keep my page loads sane when I used Disqus, I had to delay the Disqus scripts from loading until the user hit a "Load Comments" button. It's nice that Commento comes with that sort of functionality right out of the gate, along with the ability to pass in a CSS file to override the styling.
[+] [-] tracker1|7 years ago|reply
I'm glad to see alternatives... Though, I kind of miss when newsgroups and BBSes were more popular.
[+] [-] kristerv|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Chazprime|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pictur|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orthur_b|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gloflo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] everybodyknows|7 years ago|reply
https://gitlab.com/commento/commento
> ... half a second increase in page load time results in a 20% decrease in engagement and site traffic.
An intriguing stat. Wonder if the 20% figure is specific to new visitors, who have never seen the site before?
[+] [-] morningmoon|7 years ago|reply
It’s decentralized web comments. See indieweb.org for more information.
[+] [-] cabalamat|7 years ago|reply