The topic of Disqus alternatives comes up every once in a while on HN, so I was thinking about inviting the people working on Disqus alternatives to my chat room and have a conversation about their projects and the comments space in general and write a lightly edited blog post based on the chat. Here are some of the people I plan to talk to:

* `foxhop of https://www.remarkbox.com/

* `adtac of https://github.com/adtac/commento

* `KajMagnus of https://www.effectivediscussions.org/

* The person behind Isso

* The person behind https://github.com/schn4ck/schnack

* Aja of Civil Comments (it shut down recently https://medium.com/@aja_15265/saying-goodbye-to-civil-commen... )

* And of course, my own https://www.hostedcomments.com/

We actually had the first discussion in the chat room (though we went off topic very quickly), you can read it here https://www.hackerschat.net/topics/general/chat/archive/?dat...

There are a few opinions people have about this space, some feel going ad-supported is the only way, others feel bootstrapped operations are sustainable and there are others who feel there's no money in this space. If you have any questions that you would like me to ask the people mentioned above let me know here or in my chat room https://www.hackerschat.net/

Talk is part of The Coral Project from Mozilla. It's an open source commenting tool now in use on The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Intercept, and many others.

We also conduct research about online communities, as well as publishing strategy guides and trainings. https://coralproject.net/research.html

Code, Heroku install link, and more here: https://github.com/coralproject/talk/