You might like Commento which is FOSS. You can self-host it (or fire it onto a free or low cost cloud host), and fun. It’s more like a Lemmy/reddit format (comment up/down votes can be enabled) than masto but maybe you’ll enjoy it.

Users can comment anonymously or you can enable basic verification steps. Decent moderation for if spam bots find you. Etc.

ETA I used to host my instance on Heroku’s free tier and it was more than enough for what little traffic was coming to my site.

Damn, thank you so much!