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Comment by fbelzile | Hacker News Reader

Very cool. For those that want to de-Google-ify their website analytics in a more practical sense, consider using a self-hosted Matomo (formerly Piwik) instance: https://matomo.org/

I find it has 80% of the features GA has, it's GPL v3+ and only takes a few minutes to setup.

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Depending on what kind of analytics you want, Fathom is quite nice too. I recently set it up on my servers (about a month ago) and its been working well. It’s open source as well, with a public Trello board that speaks to future dev goals. https://github.com/usefathom/fathom

And here's my write up of how you can quickly host your own instance of Fathom using dokku: https://www.kn8.lt/blog/hosting-your-own-analytics-with-fath...

I can attest to the quality of Fathom. I switched over browserless.io from Google Analytics to fathom. Been very nice.

Fathom is quite nice. Very easy to deploy in Docker or Kubernetes too.

Also mentioned in the article:

> Avoid ad-blockers - My goal with analytics is to learn how people use my site so I can improve it and serve them better. I'm not using ad-tech so there's there's no point in getting blocked by 25% of visitors with an ad-blocker. That means doing 1st-party analytics, without using a 3rd-party tracking snippet—even self-hosted!*

> *Some ad-blockers already block self-hosted Matamo/Piwik tracking snippets.

I'm okay with this. If a user agent is attempting to block my tracking code (piwik.js), it's likely that the user doesn't want to be tracked.

Part of respecting user privacy is accepting the fact my tracking scripts will be blocked by most privacy extensions.

I feel Matomo does privacy correctly. By default it continues to use the well known piwik.js filename that extensions block and also respects the DNT (do not track) signal from browsers.

> I'm okay with this. If a user agent is attempting to block my tracking code (piwik.js), it's likely that the user doesn't want to be tracked.

What users DO want to be tracked????

I imagine it depends a lot on how you ask the question. How many people opt in to "share my crash data with Apple" ?

It's not that they want to be tracked, it's that they don't realize or don't care, sometimes both.

Stop being so hysteric, if you want to avoid first-party analytics then don't use the service, if someone reads my blog I have the full right to find out how long my articles are read. Protesting against first-party tracking is like protesting against visitor counters in shops and security cameras, luddism.

Actually there are a lot of things the law says about security cameras in my country...

Thankfully analytics can be blocked if someone so desires.

There is quite a bit that EU laws say about analytics as well... What's your point?

I'm not being hysteric, I'm just pointing out that the parent poster was kind of offering a a false worldview.

It's not that some of his users want to be tracked and some don't, it's more that some are aware of how to ask to not be tracked and some aren't aware.

But you're leaving out those people who actually do not care and those who find it okay to a certain extent, that was my point.

Calling someone who cares about his own privacy "hysteric" and rehashing the same tired old arguments (which inevitably boil down to "if you don't want me to do this, just make sure you don't touch my website even once!") doesn't do your position, whatever it is, a whole lot of justice.

By that logic even Apache access logs are a privacy attack. Don't fall into fear mongering either, come on.

Specifically, it's the EasyPrivacy list that blocks it. That list is one of the default ones in uBlock Origin.

The beauty of Matomo is that you can configure it to read the data from the server logs. No need for me to bother with adblockers, tracking scripts, and how it all affects my website performance.

>and only takes a few minutes to setup.

The usual trap. That's why we have managed DBs.

Matomo offers a hosted version of their product as well.

Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of keeping your analytics local to your site/service?

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