Open source

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 GitHub repo to learn how it works.

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 choose a transparent pricing model — You pay, and you get the service. Nothing more.

We also chose 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 customer's 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 frontend technologies, e.g. Next.js. We generate comment pages during the building process, so your users will see the UI immediately instead of loading a bunch of JavaScript & CSS and API calls to render the UI. The performance boost is even more noticeable on slow mobile devices.

Current state

Currently, we're in the public beta phase, so basic features should work:

• Social login
• Create a new project
• Integrate into your existing website
• Customize the widget styles
• Comment with Rich Text Formatting and markdown shortcuts
• Like a comment
• View widget analytics
• More to come!

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

End

Please feel free to try our services! We're working hard to add more features to make it easier to use, stay tuned! You can also check our GitHub repo for roadmaps or discussions. Of course,contributions are welcome! 🙌