Make your website a black hole to big tech

#1

Post by JackWritesCode » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 8:45 PM UTC

Make your website a black hole to big tech
usefathom.com

Re: Make your website a black hole to big tech

#2

Post by alanfranz » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 8:58 PM UTC

This is interesting... but I have a personal website, I won't pay ~$150/year for this service (my whole box is about $200/year).

Is there any free alternative to google analytics, including self-hosted approaches?

Re: Make your website a black hole to big tech

#3

Post by Celeo » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 9:05 PM UTC

alanfranz wrote: post #2

This is interesting... but I have a personal website, I won't pay ~$150/year for this service (my whole box is about $200/year). Is there any free alternative to google analytics, including self-hosted approaches?

These collections propose a handful of alternatives:

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#ana...

https://nomoregoogle.com/

Re: Make your website a black hole to big tech

#4

Post by curlyPubes » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 9:10 PM UTC

So... "big tech" is bad because spying on users is scummy behavior, but please do pay us to help you spy on your users.

Also, we'll provide you with tools to spy on your users, but it's software as a service and everything important happens on our servers, where we get to keep all the logs we show you, of the events that we capture from your website.

So, yes, we'll be intercepting that data, and we'll know things the same way other companies do, by being a fly on the wall, but it's totally cool. We're on your side. Trust us. We're different.

Re: Make your website a black hole to big tech

#5

Post by hmhrex » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 9:10 PM UTC

I've been using Fathom for about a little over a month now and I love it. I researched the privacy-focused analytics products out there and it came out on top: https://dev.to/hmhrex/a-comparison-of-the-top-3-privacy-focu...

Re: Make your website a black hole to big tech

#6

Post by pragmar » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 9:12 PM UTC

alanfranz wrote: post #2

This is interesting... but I have a personal website, I won't pay ~$150/year for this service (my whole box is about $200/year). Is there any free alternative to google analytics, including self-hosted approaches?

Been using self-hosted Matomo (formerly piwik) for about 6 months. It does everything I need, but mileage will vary by use case. In terms of a feature matrix, it's significantly less powerful than GA.

Re: Make your website a black hole to big tech

#7

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Make your website a black hole to big tech

#8

Post by daveslash » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

alanfranz wrote: post #2

This is interesting... but I have a personal website, I won't pay ~$150/year for this service (my whole box is about $200/year). Is there any free alternative to google analytics, including self-hosted approaches?

For my personal site, I use the free tier of StatCounter.com -- have been for over a decade now. Their site doesn't do a good job of advertising that they have a free tier, but it does exist.

Re: Make your website a black hole to big tech

#9

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 9:21 PM UTC

If I don't use Google Analytics on my website, but 70% of my visitors visit using Chrome, Google knows what's going on regardless.

Re: Make your website a black hole to big tech

#10

Post by ioddly » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 9:24 PM UTC

alanfranz wrote: post #2

This is interesting... but I have a personal website, I won't pay ~$150/year for this service (my whole box is about $200/year). Is there any free alternative to google analytics, including self-hosted approaches?

Fathom has a self hosted open source version which I found to be fine. I checked recently and it looks like commits have slowed down so I'm not sure if it's maintained.