As will all things on the internet, Disqus don’t charge for their commenting service, so they probably do something with the collected data. There’ve been privacy concerns over the years and folks like Brett Terpstra have migrated away from Disqus quite some time ago.

I now found out that the FastComments service charges a bit of money (so I’m their customer), can import existing Disqus comment databases, and looks way more minimalistic. You can see the comment box below.

It still relies on JavaScript to embed the form from their servers. I could probably roll out my own simple commenting system based on a couple of PHP files and a MySQL database. Even though that sounds fun and like the Right Thing™ to do in terms of taking ownership as an internet citizen, I’m not really looking forward to spend my time working on something like that whil I’ve got apps to develop.

So FastComments it is for now! Let’s see how they perform.