I hate ads. I also hate tracking and bloat. But I didn’t actually hate the latter quite enough to get rid of Disqus for comments. It was a free, good service, and you could turn off ads for the users (which I did). But recently they sent out a mail saying they were not longer offering a free ad-free option, and it’s not worth paying for at my usage levels, so they got the boot.
What to replace them with? The ultimate would be some kind of home-grown thing, which I could do with the hosting I have. But it’s more than I want to take on right now.
So that leaves “Comments in Mastodon” as the winner. There’s significant overlap between Mastodon users and my meager collection of blog readers, so that’s not too bad.