Open sourcing a privacy-friendly and customizable Disqus alternate 🚀🔥

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

TL;DR 🙈

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 👀

The comment widget supports Rich Text Editing and Markdown Shortcuts 📝:

Theme editor 🎨:

Widget analytics 📈:

Motivation 🤔

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. 😡

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. 😱

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

Solution 💡

Privacy 🔐

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 — 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 🚀

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 🛠

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 🤟

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

• Social login
• Create a project and integrate a widget into your website
• Comment with Rich Text Formatting and markdown shortcuts
• Comment moderation
• Widget customization
• Widget analytics
• More to come!

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

Community 🏘

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! 🙌

Conclusion 🥳

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