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Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

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Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#301

Post by tedivm »

JackWritesCode wrote: post #233
tedivm wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the old project- they have decided not to open source the new one. The open source project is barely maintained at this point- they update the readme and get the occasionally pull request, but it's not really being developed. I unfortunately switched to Fathom back when they were telling people they were committed to open source, so now I'm looking to migrate off to something a bit more trustworthy.

You've been saying this since last year. If I can help you migrate off of Fathom Lite to something else, please let me know.

Yeah, I've been busy.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#302

Post by nelaboras »

Can I ask why any private website even needs analytics? I just don't see the point. Is it just vanity, or making sure anyone actually reads the articles/content, or trying to adapt to audience preferences/search queries/...?

I get the point for any commercial venture but for most sides I simply don't see the added value. If you want to know whether people like your work add a comment section or a newsletter signup - why do you need to spy on your users with intrusive tools, send their data around the globe to kraken like google, just to have a few statistics?

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#303

Post by XCSme »

nelaboras wrote: post #302

Can I ask why any private website even needs analytics? I just don't see the point. Is it just vanity, or making sure anyone actually reads the articles/content, or trying to adapt to audience preferences/search queries/...? I get the point for any commercial venture but for most sides I simply don't see the added value. If you want to know whether people like your work add a comment section or a newsletter signup -…

What do you mean by private?

I assume many people have sites for their small businesses. Imagine you have a restaurant, you want to be able to know how many people reach your site, how they reach it, why they don't contact you (do they leave after seeing the menu? or the opening times? or the location? or photos?), are your contact forms properly working, is your website loading fast enough, etc.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#304

Post by solidasparagus »

cosmie wrote: post #300
solidasparagus wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more like the supermarket keeping track of what isles people are going down and what items they are looking at. Which supermarkets would do if they could because it's extremely valuable data.

> Which supermarkets would do if they could They can, and they do. Here[1] is a random example of applying that to a supermarket (the other pages on that vendor's site shows some of the other ways the tech can be used). Solutions tend to use a mix of video camera data and cellular data (wifi and bluetooth beacons[2]) to track in-store movements and behavior. Done well, they can also connect individual store journeys…

Very cool!

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#305

Post by Carpetsmoker »

bscphil wrote: post #276
bad_user wrote: post #115

I have my own self-hosted Matomo instance [1]. Via Docker & docker-compose it's quite easy to install and keep up to date and Matomo is open source, well maintained, very well behaved and pretty hands off. And I configured it on my websites with cookies turned off [2] and with IP anonymization [3]. In such an instance you don't need consent, or even a cookie banner, because you're not dropping cookies, or collecting…

> And I disagree with another commenter here saying Analytics is just for vanity. That's not true — even for a personal blog analytics are useful to see which articles are still being visited and thus need to be kept up to date, or in case content is deprecated, the least you could do is to put up a warning. I mean, I'm not making the argument that analytics are useless, but this seems like the worst possible example…

There may actually quite a lot of PII in the HTTP headers: IP address, Accept-Language, and User-Agent being the most obvious (especially mobile browsers often send a ridiculous amount of PII in the User-Agent header).

There's also some very useful information that's hard to get from HTTP headers, screen size being the most obvious one.

I don't think it's fundamentally more privacy-friendly. The real problem with JavaScript trackers from GA and ad networks is that they'll try to profile you with tricks like font metrics, audio API, set cross-domain cookies, and whatnot. But that doesn't apply to either Plausible or GoatCounter (and in the case of GoatCounter, the count.js script is intentionally unminified so it's very easy to see what exactly it does if you care to do so).

GoatCounter runs fine on constrained environments; it has a RES memory size of about 30M, and for the first few months goatcounter.com ran on a $5/month VPS which was mostly just sitting idle.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#306

Post by Carpetsmoker »

isiahl wrote: post #251
GordonS wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I configured it on my websites with cookies turned off [2] and with IP anonymization [3]. In such an instance you don't need consent, or even a cookie banner, because you're not dropping cookies, or collecting personal info. Profiling visitors is no longer possible, but you still get valuable data on visits. Does this mean each page hit cannot linked to be any other? For example, can I see that a visitor viewed…

Just spitballing here but could you use the Referrer header to track sequences of pages

SimpleAnalytics does this.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#307

Post by arp242 »

justinclift wrote: post #268
jbrooksuk wrote: post #42

I've been happily using Fathom Analytics: https://usefathom.com and I have zero complaints. No tracking. Privacy focused. Lightweight. You embed from your own domain. They even do site monitoring now!

Fathom started out with much fanfare as being Open Source, but as soon as their paid service gained enough traction they went proprietary only. Can't recommend a company which pulls crap like that. :(

Note that Fanthom had a change of ownership, and that the original author doesn't seem entirely happy with the change of direction either.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#308

Post by arp242 »

JackWritesCode wrote: post #286
justinclift wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For every star we had on GitHub we did 21 cents in monthly revenue ... Who gives a crap? You guys started out as OSS and said it would continue to be. That turned out to be bullcrap, just looking for exposure. > I have used both but Table Plus is 10000x better and more popular. sigh Table Plus supports many different types of database. If people are looking for a macOS specific solution that does that, Table Plus m…

We are 2 indie developers trying to build a sustainable business. We are trying to compete against Google. The idea that the open-source package is responsible for our success is ludicrous. Our success came from thousands of hours of work. You’ll believe the narrative you choose. You’re entitled to that. We will always be “liars” to you because we chose to spend our time building up the paid service. You feel like we…

I think the biggest peeve people have isn't so much that Fathom v2/PRO is closed source, but rather the "we'll open source it soon" kind of "dangling the carrot" stuff.

In the GitHub issue you mentioned "since people are confused [..]", but people are confused because your communication has quite frankly not been very good. Even today just looking at the Fathom README it's not at all clear that Fathom v2 (or "PRO") is an entirely different codebase/product which merely shares the name and branding, and not much else, and it's not clear that the "Lite" version is essentially unmaintained either.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#309

Post by Carpetsmoker »

TomGullen wrote: post #44

I still can't see any solid reasons why a site owner would not use GA. Other products: - Objectively lack features - Potentially incur extra costs in money/time - May be a small barrier in m&a - May carry additional risks/attack vectors if self hosted Trying to ween off big tech is commendable, but likely detrimental to a business. Relatively high risk, low reward. I'm happy to have my mind changed. I can see a case…

GA alternatives are a fairly new thing. When I looked at this in May last year there was essentially only one alternative: Matomo. It seems some sort of "critical mass" has been reached, and in the last year quite a few people have independently started working on alternatives.

I agree for many features are still lacking, but as a counter-argument 1) not everyone needs those features (not every product needs to solve 100% of the use cases), and 2) a lot of these products are still quite new, and are actively working on adding a number of those features.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#310

Post by Carpetsmoker »

cpuguy83 wrote: post #163

Maybe stop spying on people? EU be like you have to put up this banner to tell them you are spying... it super annoying and everyone hates it... and you be like "sure, I love me some spying".

Counting how many people come in to your store and how many of them actually but something is not "spying".
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