Replacing Disqus with Remarkbox

Disqus is a service I’ve been eying to remove for some time now after its stream of issues and continuous tracking of users . Unfortunately when migrating from WordPress to Ghost I wasn’t left with many choices. There are alternatives like Commento or Hosted Comments (now shutdown) but the former isn’t quite mature enough yet and the latter was far to expensive for my little blog.

Thankfully a recent post on Hacker News covering Disqus’ acquisition linked to a new service I hadn’t seen before, Remarkbox . I hit up Russell - Remarkbox’s creator - asked a few questions about data ownership and the migration plan then took the plunge! A short python script later we had my Disqus comments imported and I was live.

Overall its been a breezy experience. In comparison here is my post on GitLab Omnibus and New Relic when loading Disqus:

And the same post loading Remarkbox:

12 requests and ~230KB less transfered over all. Not a huge saving but I had advertising and all tracking possible disabled within Disqus to try and keep loading times low. I’m just happy to get rid of a service I couldn’t trust and support Russell!

I highly recommend Remarkbox to anyone wanting to give Disqus the ditch.