If anyone is reading this, I found Isso pretty easy to set up on localhost. (1) Installing Isso was a breeze; their documentation is top-notch -- https://posativ.org/isso/docs/install/ (2) I then updated my Hugo theme to support Isso -- https://gitlab.com/kaushalmodi/hugo-theme-refined. I use this setup for my work-blog where I serve the blog+comments from my work machine. Now I only need to get a hosting server so that I can do the comment serving for my public blog.