Bye Bye Disqus, Hello BlueSky

...And that's a shrunken down screenshot lol.

...And some of them animate, with tons of frames of animation!

...And they even crashed my web browser one time!

As of late, Disqus has introduced much larger ads into free accounts like mine. Fair enough, they gatta pay they bills. I really do get that. But, and I sincerely hope this doesn't sound rude, it doesn't mean I or the visitors of this site have put up with it. Although I am grateful for the service Disqus has provided over the years.

Anyway, I've been thinking about alternatives for a while*. Including actual Disqus alternatives, programming my own/using a free PHP host. And then I got to thinking about the old BlogSpot days where comments opened in a new window/tab. And THEN that somehow reminded me of BlueSky being a thing now (it's a Twitter-like website).

So, for the forseeable, future blog post comments will be a simple link to a BlueSky thread. Like the one below! I am still considering other options, but for now that's the plan.

For old blog entries and projects that used Disqus, I've simply removed Disqus for now and I'm still deciding what to do there. It felt a bit sad getting rid of those old comments/reactions and I appreciate them all, but the ads and bloat of Disqus just became too much for me to keep Disqus on this site in any capacity.

For the guestbook... well, I've gone and replaced it with my old SmartGB guestbook! I only removed it because it didn't have https at the time, and now it does!

Strange how ancient services like SmartGB and PollCode are still often the best solution even in 2025. Well, imo anyway. 😆

*well, FREE alternatives 😂