My self-hosted blogging woes continue..
It'd be an understatement to say that I'm not a big fan of Facebook. Facebook has been banning a lot of groups and accounts lately, seemingly algorithmically. That's kind of evil. I was seriously considering buying an Oculus headset until they started requiring that you sign in to it with your Facebook account; an utterly unnecessary step from a user point of view, only done so they can make more money and steal more of your information. Facebook sucks.
That got me thinking about how to completely distance myself from Facebook. I've still got a profile there that I regularly sign in to. Facebook is the only social network that a lot of my family and friends are on. There's just no alternative for chatting with groups of people that I know, because those people are only on Facebook, and so far this has stopped me from completely deleting my Facebook account. Today I thought I would finally remedy that, but before doing that I wanted to provide people with an alternative way to keep track of what I'm up to. My blog is where I would want to shift my activity to, but it currently does not allow people to comment, which is a big part of what makes a blog a blog, so that's really a must-have before I start pointing people to this site again.
There's two ways to add comments to a static blog: either you self-host the serverside part that stores the comments, or you use an online service like Disqus to do it for you. But don't use Disqus. The interface is utterly hideous and the free plan won't let you disable ads. Disqus also makes you jump through several unnecessary hoops to post anonymous comments, which was just clean and simple with native Wordpress. I would not recommend Disqus to anyone. Unfortunately none of the serverless alternatives offered a free plan for personal websites, so I'm out of luck there as well.
Then there's the self-hosted option. There's a few serverside packages that will deal with storing the comments for you if you don't mind spinning up a server. Some of them will even deal with span and email notifications. But for me this would mean 1. yet another piece of code that I have to maintain, and 2. cloud server resources that I have to pay for, especially if someone decides to do a spam attack on me. I have better things to do with my life than deal with that.
Sadly, this is the state of the internet right now. I want to get away from services I don't like, but the only way to do that is to invest time or money. It has never been harder than now to have a self-managed personal blog on the internet. Tim Berners-Lee's Solid project might be the best hope for a future internet, but I'm not holding my breath about it catching on any time soon. For now this blog will stay comment-less, and I will not delete my Facebook account yet..