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.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday January 31 2017, @08:38AM
Nothing annoys me more than a website which I wish to use the full functionality of, but which pulls in javascript from 12 different domains. Any one of those gets DNS poisoned, and I'd be running code from malicious sources in a probably leaky sandbox. One careless backward incompatibility introduced by the JS providers on an update, and the webpage stops working. It's all too fragile for words, and is alas considered the standard way of doing things nowadays. There are no engineers involved in the modern web.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves