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After reading the story about Disqus stopping the free version, I remembered this article in which artist behind Pepper and Carrot comic, David Revoy, narrates how he dropped Gravatar, and other external dependencies, like fonts or icons. He even created an avatar generator based around cats. Social networks are still there, but only can track you if you click, the images are locally hosted. You may have heard about this artist, as he was involved in some Blender projects, Krita videos and general promotion of FLOSS for artistic purposes.
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Replacing Gravatar and Other External Dependencies
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New crypt. See /usr/news/crypt.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Monday January 30 2017, @07:48PM
Always keep in mind that there are no free lunches. Any company claiming to be handing one out is only trying to get its tech so deeply embedded and ubiquitous in our daily lives that they can charge money for it down the road, or embed spyware and extract value by nefarious means.
There is Free Software, entirely different concept. But anyone handing out free server resources, i.e. paying a cost for every access, does not have your best interest in mind; whether "your" is evaluated from the perspective of a webmaster or a user.
Outsourcing ads is just as horrible but for different reasons. So sack up, realize there are no free lunches and when you build a website host ALL of it on your own infrastructure and sell your own ads. Do use Free Software for all of it, so long as it is really free and you host the instance.
Google's services are the closest thing to an exception to this rule but they are only playing a longer game, it is still a bad idea long term but the evil it is far enough in the future you can justify using some of their stuff now and slowly replacing it. For now though it is far easier to embed Google for your site search and get the side benefit of assuring Google indexes your site and you get some control of the process. Same for their hosting of some almost universally used scripts, everyone pointing to google's copy saves a lot of network overhead and page load time as browsers cache it. Eventually phasing out either will have little visible impact on a website so Google must content itself with profiting on the sides by datamining.
Now consider disqus, they had half the Internet's comments in their silo when they felt they were dominant enough to switch from money pit .com to revenue positive. Signing on with them should have been seen as dangerous from day one since their recent move was entirely predictable.
Evaluate any outside dependency your site has and determine which extreme it is closer to. Any on the disqus side needs an action plan NOW while those on the google end can wait but you should remain watchful and be ready to act swiftly should they go rogue.
Also evaluate whether the outside dependency is costing you traffic or revenue. Outsourced ads lead to vile scum and ads your readers don't care about and eventually they tire of being attacked by you and install ad blockers. Other addons slow your page load time and drive away viewers, balance this against any revenue you get from them.
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Monday January 30 2017, @08:05PM
Got any specific OSS you found useful?
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Monday January 30 2017, @08:34PM
There's also a third model: A restricted product for free, and the full product for money.
And frankly, in principle I don't have a problem with services that demand money. I mean, if I don't think it is worth the money, I won't buy it, but at least I'll know up from what it costs me if I want to use it.
Unfortunately paying money does not guarantee that they don't data-mine you, and indeed the data needed for payment makes data-mining easier. Which in effect means that even for paid-for services I don't know what it costs me.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by nitehawk214 on Monday January 30 2017, @09:34PM
The problem with this model is if they feel they are not making enough money they will restrict features further in the free version. Or just discontinue it entirely.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday January 31 2017, @08:30AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday January 31 2017, @02:56PM
I think this is what this article is all about. Not enough people are paying for the $$$$ version, so they are taking away the free version. When you are not open source, this is what a company can do.
It sucks, but it is their right to do so. I would only trust a company in this position if the free product was open source.
Now in Gravatar's case, it isn't just some software you can download, there is some server component that must be maintained. (as I understand it) This kind of complicates the matter, but it still means you can't trust the company. I still think this is a cash-grab by Disqus, How long until their blog comments product does the same?
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh