Open sourcing a privacy-friendly and customizable Disqus alternate 🚀🔥
Tags: javascript, webdev, react, opensource
Published: 2022-01-24 12:04:22

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

## TL;DR 🙈

Chirpy is a **privacy-friendly** and **customizable** [Disqus](https://disqus.com/) alternate. With Chirpy, you can reach your audience quickly and build a better community. Check out our [GitHub repo](https://github.com/devrsi0n/chirpy) to learn how it works.

## Preview 👀

The comment widget supports Rich Text Editing and [Markdown Shortcuts](/docs/features/markdown) 📝:
![Chirpy comment editor](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/35ya5bscuwjneu3h9y6j.png)

Theme editor 🎨:
![Chirpy theme](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/qwpyfvk6pq8hhw3qqxj0.png)
 

Widget analytics 📈:
![Widget analytics](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/55rk6k4fhxg9yy4kdqkk.png)
 

## 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.](https://twitter.com/martingund/status/1207327648093003777) 😡

![Disqus' agreement to use privacy info](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/0wxulz85czqohgv6xci7.png)
 
![Disqus' tracking options](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/fuyojfb393at51nhgxgz.png)
 

And [Disqus facing $3M fine in Norway for tracking users without consent](https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/05/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.](https://supunkavinda.blog/disqus) 😱

![A Disqus widget use 76 requests](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/myp3my2guufg26upetai.png)
 

You can find a ton of [privacy](https://www.google.com.hk/search?q=disqus+privacy&oq=disqus+privacy) and [performance](https://www.google.com.hk/search?q=disqus+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](https://plausible.io/) instance to avoid sharing your data with third-party companies. Plausible is an [open-source](https://github.com/plausible/analytics/) and [privacy-friendly](https://plausible.io/privacy-focused-web-analytics) software as well, we have the same privacy goal.

### Performance 🚀

For performance issues, we built our services with modern technologies, e.g., [Next.js](https://nextjs.org/). 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](https://www.typescriptlang.org)

Full-stack framework: [Next.js](https://nextjs.org)

Data server:[GraphQL](https://graphql.org) [Hasura](https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine)

API client: [urql](https://github.com/FormidableLabs/urql)

Authentication: [next-auth](https://github.com/nextauthjs/next-auth)

Style: [TailwindCSS](https://tailwindcss.com) [twin.macro](https://github.com/ben-rogerson/twin.macro)

Testing:  [Cypress](https://www.cypress.io) [Jest](https://jestjs.io)

Analytics: [Plausible](https://github.com/plausible/analytics)

## 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](http://chirpy.dev/docs/features/markdown)
- Comment moderation
- [Widget customization](http://chirpy.dev/docs/features/theme)
- [Widget analytics](http://chirpy.dev/docs/features/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](https://github.com/devrsi0n/chirpy), it has been released under the [Apache-2.0 License](https://github.com/devrsi0n/chirpy/blob/main/LICENSE) that lets you inspect, modify, and re-purpose it as you would like. You can also check our [GitHub repo](https://github.com/devrsi0n/chirpy) for roadmaps or discussions. Of course, contributions are welcome! 🙌

## Conclusion 🥳

Please feel free to try [our service](https://chirpy.dev/)! We're working hard to add more features to make it easier to use, stay tuned!