Utterances

Utterances is a lightweight comments widget that stores every comment as a GitHub issue on a repository the site owner controls. It has no tracking and no advertising, is free and open source, is styled with Primer, GitHub's own CSS toolkit, supports a dark theme, and is written in vanilla TypeScript with no font downloads, frameworks or polyfills.

Storing comments as GitHub issues is an elegant solution to the problem that makes every other commenting system a commitment. Comments normally live in a vendor's database, and leaving means an export in a format nothing else reads, which is why sites stay on systems they dislike. Here the data was never anywhere else, so there is genuinely nothing to migrate.

The requirement that commenters have a GitHub account is the corresponding limitation and it is decisive. On a developer's blog, nearly every reader already has one; on a recipe site, almost nobody does, which restricts this to a specific and self selecting audience.

The weight claim is the technical argument. No frameworks, no font downloads and no polyfills is the opposite of what a hosted comment embed does to a page, which for a static site is often the whole reason to choose it, since the point of generating pages ahead of time is defeated by an embed that loads a megabyte at read time.