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Comment by dave_aiello | Hacker News Reader

I have no love for Google Analytics, but as a small-scale publisher, I have serious questions about what tools can replace it:

1) Which analytics can a website employ that is not geared toward enriching the analytics platform developer by violating site visitor privacy?

2) Do those analytics mechanisms have any kind of aftermarket, such that third-party developers integrate it into publishing platforms that publishers use.

3) What do those analytics mechanisms and the associated tooling cost?

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I think collecting analytics from the server logs is going to get more popular again, though a problem for SPAs? We could call it Edge Analytics this time around and run it on cloudflare.

For publishing systems, couldn't wordpress report back analytics data to itself, on its own domain? Something like that existed but i'm not sure if it was using Jetpack servers or not. If this isn't already possible, it seems like an obvious thing for someone privacy concious to build.

This exists over here: https://github.com/ibericode/koko-analytics - never used it myself though.

I'm not sure about all of your questions but there's platforms like matomo out there, that seem to be able to handle some of the use cases for ga.

Matomo: #1 Secure Open Web Analytics Platform https://matomo.org/

I've been very happy with Plausible.io for my dinky little blog. It has all the information I need, and isn't as intrusive as GA.

I use a self-hosted Matomo instance, in a Docker setup on my own server. Low maintenance, works great:

https://matomo.org/

You can turn off the cookies too, anonymize IPs (the default actually) and if you do that you don't even need GDPR consent or cookie banners.

Goat Counter (yeah, weird name) seems to be getting popular, and it's Open Source:

https://www.goatcounter.com

There's been a recent thread with lot of options discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23560823, also https://lobste.rs/s/lvdj3w/lightweight_alternatives_google

For small-scale anything, the best analytics are simply talking to your customers.

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