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devrsi0n
devrsi0n

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Open sourcing a privacy-friendly and customizable Disqus alternate ๐Ÿš€๐Ÿ”ฅ

We're so excited to announce that Chirpy has been open-sourced now. ๐Ÿš€

TL;DR ๐Ÿ™ˆ

Chirpy is a privacy-friendly and customizable Disqus alternate. With Chirpy, you can reach your audience quickly and build a better community. Check out our GitHub repo to learn how it works.

Preview ๐Ÿ‘€

The comment widget supports Rich Text Editing and Markdown Shortcuts ๐Ÿ“:
Chirpy comment editor

Theme editor ๐ŸŽจ:
Chirpy theme

Widget analytics ๐Ÿ“ˆ:
Widget analytics

Motivation ๐Ÿค”

You may wonder why we build a Disqus alternate in 2022. Well, here are the answers:

Disqus shared the personal data of tens of millions of users without them or the websites knowing about it. ๐Ÿ˜ก

Disqus' agreement to use privacy info

Disqus' tracking options

And Disqus facing $3M fine in Norway for tracking users without consent

Disqus also encumbers your website's performance: Disqus makes 76 HTTP Requests per load. ๐Ÿ˜ฑ

A Disqus widget use 76 requests

You can find a ton of privacy and performance related issues of Disqus if you google it.

Solution ๐Ÿ’ก

Privacy ๐Ÿ”

To avoid such privacy issues, we chose our business model with privacy-friendly in mind. First, we'll be honest: money is necessary for keeping the project development going. A price is always exacted for what free services bestow. You see Ads or you lose privacy. We pick a transparent pricing model โ€” You pay, and you get the service. Nothing more.

We also decided our tech stacks carefully, and we prefer to use self-hosted versions of third-party services. For example, for analytics, we self-hosted a plausible instance to avoid sharing your data with third-party companies. Plausible is an open-source and privacy-friendly software as well, we have the same privacy goal.

Performance ๐Ÿš€

For performance issues, we built our services with modern technologies, e.g., Next.js. We generate comment pages during the building process, so user will see the UI immediately instead of waiting for a bunch of JavaScript & CSS and API calls to render the UI. The performance boost is even more noticeable on slow mobile devices.

Tech stacks ๐Ÿ› 

We choose modern tech stacks with privacy and performance in mind:

Language: TypeScript

Full-stack framework: Next.js

Data server:GraphQL Hasura

API client: urql

Authentication: next-auth

Style: TailwindCSS twin.macro

Testing: Cypress Jest

Analytics: Plausible

Current state ๐ŸคŸ

Currently, we're in the public beta phase, all basic features should work, e.g.

Please note: you may lose your data if there are some hard conflicts during our database migration, but that should be rare.

Community ๐Ÿ˜

The community is at the core of how we build chirpy. Community members are at best a channel for evangelism. We want to empower you to participate directly in the creation of Chirpy ecosystems. Chirpy only get more accomplished and pleasing as the surrounding communities grow, enabling a broader range of audiences and use cases.

Chirpy is available on GitHub, it has been released under the Apache-2.0 License that lets you inspect, modify, and re-purpose it as you would like. You can also check our GitHub repo for roadmaps or discussions. Of course, contributions are welcome! ๐Ÿ™Œ

Conclusion ๐Ÿฅณ

Please feel free to try our service! We're working hard to add more features to make it easier to use, stay tuned!

Top comments (9)

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codewander profile image
Kanishka

I wanted to comment on an NYTimes article and they only have crappy discussion options. I hope they adopt this and a lot more sites do as well.

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msamgan profile image
Mohammed Samgan Khan

only issue with this is they ask for sign in for all the comments which is a bit annoying.
more over there is no dedicated page for post link comment filtration.
apart from that all looks good.

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devrsi0n profile image
devrsi0n

Thanks for the feedback, will consider your suggestions.

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msamgan profile image
Mohammed Samgan Khan

ones you implement the the open comments.
i am on board.
ill be waiting..

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matheusmurden profile image
Matheus Murden

Dude, THIS IS AWESOME! Kudos to you!!!

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xrynter profile image
Xrynter

got this from here techbomb.net

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deerhound579 profile image
Sixian Li

Already integrated into my blog. Love it.

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chinkaimu profile image
Chinkaimu

Nick work!

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xinglee23 profile image
Xinglee

nice