Discourse is quite popular, I see it regularly on new sites. Though it doesn't really fit the same niche as disqus.

I've seen it used to operate as footer comments on blogs.

Dgraph Labs uses it. I am a bit ambivalent about it. For example: https://dgraph.io/blog/post/putting-it-all-together-part1/

Here it says 7 comments. But you only get to see one. You have to click into the discourse post to get more. This is due to Discourse's threading model. 6 of the comments were replying to the one on the blog post itself.

I see 7 comments when I go to that page. Dig Dgraph fix something in the last hour? Or is the site treating you differently from me because I'm completely unknown to it?

Discourse prefers a single level threading model, until Reddit or HN. So, you can in fact see all the 7 comments there. Not sure why you only see one.

I also only see one - probably just a bug due to different browsers/adblockers.

> basically zero presence in the parts of the web I'm around

What parts of the web are that, if I may ask?

I think Discourse is popular in software and tech related organizations — I see it a lot on such websites.