I recently upgraded this blog to Ghost 2.x and took the opportunity to abandon Disqus. It bloated the post page and came with something like 45 tracking scripts/cookies. To replace it I settled on Commento, a small and privacy-focused open source solution. The minimum subscription is $3/month, which is a bit high for a blog that I only pay $5/month for. Luckily they offer a self-hosted option. Here is how I got it setup.
To accompany my recent handle change I took the time to upgrade this blog.
Ghost's email guide leans pretty heavily on external services. It doesn't seem to think most people will want to use the server they are running on.