We ditched Google Analytics
missiveapp.com
We ditched Google Analytics
1–10 of 79 posts
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#2On my personal blog, I just decided to go without any analytics. I feel like I'm writing for myself and to engage a close group of friends. Maybe make some new friends along the way.
I don't want to blog for page views or retweets, it just feels like it creates a bad set of incentives. Ultimately the feeder bar of vanity metrics feels so draining. The important post that 5 people deeply appreciate is just as valuable as a shallow clickbait listicle post that 1000s of people scan through.
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#3Is anyone using an open source statistics system that's as simple as simple analytics? Maybe even something that can be setup to run stats for multiple clients from our own VPS?
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#4How private is using localStorage for ID persistence instead of cookies for Google Analytics - and in general? It's what I'm using, but obviously it takes an expert to figure out just how much of an improvement it is.
Apparently Service Workers can also be used.
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#5How private is using localStorage for ID persistence instead of cookies for Google Analytics - and in general? It's what I'm using, but obviously it takes an expert to figure out just how much of an improvement it is. Apparently Service Workers can also be used. https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
Seems to me like LocalStorage in this case is just a way to get around people deleting/blocking cookies. What would be the legitimate use?
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#6Is anyone using an open source statistics system that's as simple as simple analytics? Maybe even something that can be setup to run stats for multiple clients from our own VPS?
A relatively simple log analyzer, the kind we used to use in before que Analytics craze is GoAccess: https://goaccess.io/
If you want something more complex, Analytics style, you could try Matomo (Used to be called Piwik): https://matomo.org/
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#7if all you need is counting a number of users, then you can use cloudflare analytics
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#8How private is using localStorage for ID persistence instead of cookies for Google Analytics - and in general? It's what I'm using, but obviously it takes an expert to figure out just how much of an improvement it is. Apparently Service Workers can also be used. https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
localStorage is no different than cookies from the perspective of privacy laws. https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2905...
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#9Nice, idea for someone (I wish I had time)...
"Good Housekeeping Seal" for Analytics
- Self host analytics
- Don't use google analytics
- Don't use tracking pixels (FB, Reddit, etc)
- etc
"Good Housekeeping Seal" for Billing Practices (in same vein, a little off topic though)
- Can cancel your subscription online
- Sends reminders prior to charging card (dark pattern on some sites)
- Open receipt API to scrape out historical spend data - started some thoughts here- https://github.com/HipSpec/invoice-data-api-specification
- No sneaky trial => subscription without warning
- etc
====
I think most of us here acknowledge that privacy or "how the sausage is made" generally doesn't sell to businesses & consumers. But I think there's some fertile ground between a self attestation (PCI style) and a $40-50k SOC Audit.
There are a ton of incumbents that at this point could not strip out spyware from their application/data stacks even with 100 human years of engineering effort... could be a competitive advantage for smaller/newer organizations to leverage.
Good Housekeeping reference: https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/institute/about-the-institu...
Thanks for sharing the article, SimpleAnalytics, Posthog & Fathom are steps in the right direction. Also shout out to Matomo/Piwik, one of the OG's in self hosted/ Google analytics alternatives.
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#10Is anyone using an open source statistics system that's as simple as simple analytics? Maybe even something that can be setup to run stats for multiple clients from our own VPS?
GoatCounter[1] was featured on HN at some point. Open source, written in Go. It has a "subsite" feature which I haven't played with.