I see they are using Algolia to do the requests (at least for HN) on the front-end. Unfortunately it is limited, as you cannot get from there whether the current thread is opened for comments or whether the comments are opened for reply. That's why I'm parsing Algolia AND HN's website for each of the comments, to mix the data. Also it makes it easier doing the work on the back-end to add new services and not depending on a 3rd party. See the changelog on the bottom of https://comments.network/ to see those bugs fixed really recently.

I understand, but comments.network js snippet will stop working if you stop your server (comments.network/api), which is a 3rd-party service. Am I right?

Right now (alpha) yes, but I'm exploring other options for its future. Do you have any idea? I want to avoid fragmentation initially so open-source right now is not viable as I cannot support many different pre-releases from different users, but I've definitely considering open-sourcing it in the future ( see http://github.com/franciscop/ ).

For the sake of it I will point out that the alternative, is actually two different third-parties dependencies, http://embedd.io/ snippet and https://hn.algolia.com/ service (;

Since HackerNews itself use algolia, I think its safe to use it. And embedd can easily switch to official HN api.

I just saw that network.comments use internal api too for Reddit while it have a clean json API. I think it could be nicer for network.comments to be more transparent and to not depend on third party like network.comments internal api. In order to prevent servers maintenance and to give more privacy.

Imagine tomorrow, network.comments seduce every hackers on the world and have more than 100k blog are requesting network.comments/api server. You'll ask guys to install their own instance which is not your first goal to avoid installing stuff.