There's several comment integrations you can choose from https://ghost.org/integrations/community/

That is exactly my point. With Ghost, I would have to resort to a third party service to have something so essential as a commenting system for a blog. Comments are a part of your blog's content and it is necessary to have your own control over it, as these third party providers can shut down or just ban your site for any reason(take Google Plus comments for instance which many blogs were using as a commenting platform for their blogs). Relying on a third party provider for comments should be a choice, not a compulsion.

Aren't comments a response to your blog content and not part of the content itself? Having the option to use a multitude of commenting services seems like lots of control surely?

If you look at the various options being suggested in the comments here you'll see many of them don't come with comments out of the box. Jekyll, Gatsby, Hugo, 11ty all require you to use a third party service or roll your own.

I strongly believe that they are a part of the content, just not in the traditional sense. Many times I find more substance in the comments than in the main content. Sure it's great to have more control over which commenting system to choose, but would adding a native commenting diminish that control? Certainly not right? (If you check out ghost's forums, you will find many people asking for a native commenting system)

Yes none of those static site generators support commenting, making them not very suitable for blogging(they dont even support searches). That is why I am not a proponent of static generators as a blogging platform.

Ghost itself chose to not solve commenting. They give you flexibility to install commenting via js or however else you see fit by allowing editing of templates.

I wonder what the motivation for that would have been. There seem to be many users of Ghost who are asking for this functionality and I don't think it's a big deal for the Ghost team to implement that. I think it is not a good idea to rely on a third party for commenting especially if you have a thriving blog. They could ban you or just shut down services(Google Plus comments), some insert their own ads(Disqus) and so on.

Glad to hear it's no big deal to solve it :) https://github.com/tryghost - looking forward to your PR!

I see you are a founder of Ghost. Maybe I would have given it a shot if I were proficient in Node or JS :) But I remember creating toy blog app that had commenting feature, some years back.

Like the GP, I was also under the impression that Ghost doesn't support commenting by design but you are suggesting otherwise. I find it hard to believe that adding commenting system(something that all major CMSs have had since forever) would be that technically challenging that it hasn't been added even six years after its first release.