I've almost finished this side project I've been working on for a while!

For years I’ve wanted a clear way to know if a show improves or worsens over time. So I made this! More for fun than anything else 😃.

Any feedback is very welcome!

There's still a few bugs to iron out, and more tests to write, but it's mostly done feature wise:
🔹 Episode rating graph
🔹 "Where to watch" info based on your location
🔹 Best & worst episodes
🔹 Episode summaries
🔹 Similar shows

It also uses some awesome libraries / tools: Zustand for app state, EmotionCSS for complex styling, Cypress for some light e2e tests, Storybook for component library, react-element-query for container queries. I also tried out Plausible which has been great! 👍

The Game of Thrones chart is pretty funny, big nose dive in the end! 😅

Hey man, congrats for the launch. I liked the idea of having a blog with some great privacy and simplicity. I also think that most if the time we don't need 90 percent of fancy features that platforms like WordPress offer.

My suggestion would be changing your positioning when it comes to marketing. Except few of them, your users are "ordinary" people. So you really need to stop telling them about react or nextjs. They simply don't care and don't understand. It is like going to pharmacy, ask for a medicine for my headache and listen the guy talking about chemicals and their reactions in my body.

Also, "making money with your content" should be something you "sell" after gaining at least few thousands customer i guess. If it was me, i would play on privacy, simplicity and speed (without talking about tech stack) compare other platforms with yours. Let's say, tell me how they are slow, show me numbers. Compare yourself with medium, make a privacy comparison maybe.

https://plausible.io/ is something you can check. The way they position their selves is great 👍

I guess you are on something and congratulations.

Haven’t heard of either (I’m not a web dev) but the site OP posted has a comparison article on their site. Seems to be lighter, faster, and lacks cookies at the cost of less features and less functionality.

Privacy is really important to us, especially since we use elementary OS ourselves. You can read about our beliefs and things we do to protect your privacy on our blog here: https://blog.elementary.io/tags/#privacy

Some big points: * We don’t engage in targeted advertising or any other business models that would incentivize data collection * We don’t have any telemetry, anonymous or not, in elementary OS * On our website we use Plausible analytics which is anonymized and our dashboard is public so you can verify there is no personally identifying information collected: https://plausible.io/elementary.io * Speaking of verification, all of our software is Open Source which makes it available for audit and scrutiny. Even other companies who claim to be pro-privacy like Apple can’t really be independently audited by the general public like we can * We’re actively working on app sandboxing features which will make it more difficult for apps to gain access to any information on your computer that you don’t specifically allow them to

Permissive licences are a threat to original developpers' attempts to finance their project's development. At some point amazon could by sheer scale become the new upstream or/and close the source code and make it fully proprietary. Copyleft and particularly AGPL were meant to protect against that.

You are wrong. Up until recently only Google AMP pages got included in the search result carousel. There are dozen sources that confirm this.

https://plausible.io/blog/google-amp

> The Top Stories carousel feature on Google Search will be updated to include all news content. This means that using the AMP format is no longer required and that any page, irrespective of its Core Web Vitals score or page experience status, will be eligible to appear in the Top Stories carousel.

See how even Google admitted that for years Google AMP was required for top story results.

I'm working on a new web analytics tool. So far super happy I decided to go with Elixir/Phoenix for this project, I got the MVP done very quickly. Next I'm switching gears to marketing, design and copywriting but I also have some really cool features planned that I cannot wait to start coding :)

Just launched the beta yesterday, check it out: https://plausible.io/

> I wanted to say "but there can't be that many power users in firefox user base, most of it would be users that are clueless about telemetry".

Huh? The people who are clueless about telemetry are the ones who use a browser made by a multi-billion dollar ad-tech company.

Firefox users tend to be more privacy-conscious (e.g. 88% of Firefox users block Google Analytics compared to 50% of Chrome users). So they're also more likely to turn telemetry off, and probably even more likely if using addons like uBlock Origin.

So yes, it's really annoying to me that they constantly use this excuse when removing features or making changes that people don't want. But nowhere near annoying enough that I'd go anywhere near Chrome. I'd rather use Lynx.

Thank you for checking it out!

Let me know what you think of it when you try it out :D

I don't know much about the approval process with the app store but I completely get what you mean. If you're willing to, you can still install the app by tapping Share then "Add to Homescreen". It'll add the app with a proper logo and without the browser interface.

As for privacy, the only analytics I'm using is from Plausible.io. I don't want to track people or sell their data and Plausible is a privacy-friendly tool.

Plausible is a privacy focused analytics platform. It doesn’t collect any personal data so it is GDPR and CCPA compatible. Plus it is open source, and it has a nice proxy feature that allows it to not be blocked by tracker blockers, so your stats are more accurate.

You can learn more here: https://plausible.io/vs-google-analytics

I'm working on Plausible Analytics and we've taken many steps to be as privacy-focused as possible.

Modern dashboard, simple and useful metrics, open source (can be self-hosted too), lightweight script (<1 KB) and doesn't collect personal data (no cookies, no localstorage, no persistent identifiers, no way to track people between different sites and devices...).

We are a sustainable project funded by the fees our subscribers pay us. Our subscribers own their site data and we are not using the data for any purpose and we are not sharing the data with anyone

https://plausible.io/

If your blog is static website there is no other use for cookies than spying. I do not think you do it on purpose but you give to big tech do unethical stuff throw your blog.

I have tea related blog too, I use jekyll as generator (awesome technology 100% recommmend) and for trafic info I use plausible.io . Plausible is open source and ethical.

Love this initiative and thanks for all that work!

I'm working on one of the Google Analytics alternatives that's listed on that Switching.social page you linked to (Plausible Analytics). There's no easy self-hosting now but we're expecting the alpha version to be ready this month (see details on Github).

Recently I published a post on "Why you should stop using Google Analytics on your website" and it was shared widely on Hacker News, Lobsters, Mastodon and so on. More than 85,000 visitors by now so there's definitely some interest in a change!

Friends don’t let friends use Google Analytics.

Thanks a lot for the feedback - I appreciate it!

> I liked the idea of having a blog with some great privacy and simplicity. I also think that most if the time we don't need 90 percent of fancy features that platforms like WordPress offer.

Agreed - this was a big motivator for building Papyrus.

> My suggestion would be changing your positioning when it comes to marketing. Except few of them, your users are "ordinary" people. So you really need to stop telling them about react or nextjs. They simply don't care and don't understand. It is like going to pharmacy, ask for a medicine for my headache and listen the guy talking about chemicals and their reactions in my body.

This is good advice. I originally created this with the intention of being a Hashnode / Dev.to competitor, aimed at developers, but eventually pivoted away from this and began targeting everyone. I just removed references to the tech stack on the home page. Thanks for the feedback!

> Also, "making money with your content" should be something you "sell" after gaining at least few thousands customer i guess. If it was me, i would play on privacy, simplicity and speed (without talking about tech stack) compare other platforms with yours. Let's say, tell me how they are slow, show me numbers. Compare yourself with medium, make a privacy comparison maybe.

Thanks for this advice as well. I did create comparison pages between Papyrus and Medium/Substack (ie, https://papyrus.dev/vs-medium). I do want to still emphasize "making money with content", since I think this would be a motivator for folks (with large followers) to move over from Revue/Substack to Papyrus.

> https://plausible.io/ is something you can check. The way they position their selves is great 👍

I'm using Plausible for privacy-preserving analytics on Papyrus, actually! Agreed - I do love their positioning.

> I guess you are on something and congratulations.

Thanks again for all the feedback!

I've almost finished this side project I've been working on for a while!

For years I’ve wanted a clear way to know if a show improves or worsens over time. So I made this! More for fun than anything else 😃. Made with Next.js, TailwindCSS and MongoDB!

Any feedback is very welcome!

There's still a few bugs to iron out, and more tests to write, but it's mostly done feature wise:
🔹 Episode rating graph
🔹 "Where to watch" info based on your location
🔹 Best & worst episodes
🔹 Episode summaries
🔹 Similar shows

It also uses some awesome libraries / tools: Zustand for app state, EmotionCSS for complex styling, Cypress for some light e2e tests, Storybook for component library, react-element-query for container queries. I also tried out Plausible analytics which is working great! 👍

The Game of Thrones chart is pretty funny, big nose dive in the end! 😅

You could look into something like https://plausible.io/ that comes out of the box ready for both of those. You may also want to look into having some sort of privacy policy or terms of service if you're going to collect user data.

These days collecting user data in any form is risky business, and that's on purpose. People want their privacy and more than every people want to know when something they are using is reporting any information back to a server that isn't directly related to core functionality of the application.

Thank you so much! This is the kind of response I was looking for.

>What does your architecture look like (or stack+hosting, if it's a smaller content-oriented site)?

The website is built using Gatsby and I am using a self-hosted instance of Ghost for managing content. For analytics, I'm using something called Plausible.

Twitter is another good platform to grow this type of business. Some examples of successful case studies here and here.

I've created a directory of case studies of founders using different strategies to grow their business here. Feel free to download it for your own usage

A few of the things you listed as not having would be OK.

Ads are fine - as far as i know - as long as they're carefully selected and definitely don't track. Frankly I dont know how you'd go about doing this properly.

Plausible is an analytics provider that you might want to take a look at, if you want analytics to begin with. Again, no idea how it works, but the option is there.

Thanks! Yeah, Matomo is great if you're looking for a more ethical full-blown Google Analytics replacement with pretty much all the same stuff that GA tracks too.

Plausible is a bit different from them both as it's built with simplicity, speed and privacy in mind. Our script is lighter (<1 KB), we track only the most important metrics so it's easier to understand and you're set out of the box and no need for extra configuration to make it compliant with regulations as we don't use cookies and don't track personal data by default.

There's a bit longer comparison here: https://plausible.io/vs-matomo

I'm building an alternative at plausible.io

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Check out the live demo and let me know what you think. The roadmap is public so you can check out where the project is going here: https://feedback.plausible.io/roadmap

&gt; Is there a way to do traffic analytics that's not creepy?

I'm working on a privacy-conscious analytics tool at https://plausible.io. It's not open-source yet but I'm considering making it open to verify the privacy claims. Let me know what you think!

I use Plausible, but any script tag can be included in the app section of your nuxt.config.ts | js:

import { defineNuxtConfig } from 'nuxt'

export default defineNuxtConfig({ app: { head: { script: [{ defer: 'defer', // 'data-domain': 'mydomain.com' (Plausible-specific), src: 'https://plausible.io/js/plausible.js' }], }, } })

Good question, I use https://plausible.io/, it is an alternative to Google Analytics. I haven't used Google Analytics yet but Plausible is very simple to integrate, easy to add custom events and stats are helpful too.

btw, you can also set GA up with https://stape.io/ to bypass adblockers. Or your own setup.

I used Plausible.io and love them, but I needed a bit more data so I had to move to GA. I hope to return to them one day next year. I didn't know they had an API and that is what I am hoping I can use to do some cool stuff.

Grüße! Hier eine tolle Übersicht über die Dinge, die man als Entwickler beachten muss: https://blog.blether.chat/2022/08/03/gdpr-for-developers-by-example/

BTW es gibt eine großartige open source, DSGVO konforme, Cookiebannerfreie tracking solution, die man selbst hosten kann: Plausible

We dont use third parties that require cookies nor do we collect any personal/private data or store identifiable data in cookies. We use Plausible for our traffic analytics, which does not use cookies. See: https://plausible.io/privacy-focused-web-analytics

The streamer HasanAbi doesn’t enforce the copyright to his stream vods. Because of that there are dozens of fan channels clipping his content which they are allowed to monetize.
These channels range from 5k to 150k subscriber and get millions of views each month: https://twitter.com/chrcit/status/
1526942180887080966
The web app I made aggregates ~20 of these channels are auto detects topics from the video titles.
I built the initial version with Next over a weekend while I had Covid and then refactored it to Remix for the next version launch 3 weeks later.
It launched to over 30k people when the streamer looked at it live: https://twitter.com/chrcit/status/1519797007904346115
People were so nice to donated 90 euro in total since the launch in late April.
Stack:
- Remix w/ Typescript
- Tailwind
- Planetscale for serverless MySQL
- Vercel for hosting
- Plausible for
- Sentry for monitoring
Open Analytics: https://plausible.io/hasanhub.com
If you have any questions I’m happy to answer :)

> Just like plausible and other consentless banner analytic tools.

Plausible Analytics offers its customers a data processing agreement. This clarifies that Plausible acts only as a data processor on behalf of its customers, not as an independent data controller. <https://plausible.io/dpa>

I don't like some claims made by Plausible, but they have a very good compliance story.

> Unless I can find something like "cookie free" analytics tool.

I've heard of "plausible" (https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-cookies) but haven't used them myself so I can't vouch as to whether they're good. Just know that they exist.

I've been meaning to give Plausible a whirl for a good while now, don't know why but this thread tipped the balance.

Not just for privacy concerns, but also because GA is slow, painful to use, unwieldy, and honestly broken to me I think (or I just can't figure out how to use it).

2 hours later... ...now I have a self-hosted Plausible install, working perfectly, instantly updating and working great in production on multiple sites.

Even better, it has a standard+supported way of excluding myself from the stats (https://plausible.io/docs/excluding-localstorage).

So far, super impressed!

(NB I'm using the free self-host version at the moment while I get comfortable, but this is one area where I like their thesis so much and it solves such a problem for me I will pay a sub as soon as I've given it a bit of time to bed in and check I can do everything I need).

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Cookie/privacy consents are a scourge of the modern internet and make it a hell to use (even with browser extensions to auto-answer). This means I can legit not put loads of crap in front of my precious site users' experience.

All their visitor data is publicly available here: https://plausible.io/stacker.news?period=all

At this rate, they'll be closer to 300,000 pageviews in July.

1. Not anymore: https://plausible.io/blog/google-amp

2. If amp was prioritized before, it was not due to money. Google has 2 separate orgs for ads and search. How much money amp makes through ads has pretty much no influence over search priorities.

I am planning to have pricing based on pageviews so anyone can start using it without cost and pay me when they get success with their content. There will be no cap on the number of websites you can create with it.
Here is the pricing plan, it may change a little but would be not much
1. A generous free tier: Up to 5k pageviews/month (with a made with docswrite branding ) + Unlimited domains
2. $10/m for up to 15k pageviews/month (No docswrite branding)
3. $30/m for up to 100k pageviews/month (No docswrite branding)
4. If more than 100k pageviews a month then it's $150/m and Enterprise pricing
All the analytics tracking would be done by reliable https://plausible.io which is privacy-friendly.

You would be able to connect your domain/sub-domain and I will also be helping you to host it as a subroute (*/blog) on your website.

It doesn't appear that you can self-host Fathom so you would be taking their word that Fathom's privacy policy is true. After the Snowden leaks, you can't really trust that a privacy policy means anything.

Matomo and Plausible are the only alternative options I see.

Other comments have noted it's definitely bad, but I'll go a step further and say it's less relevant.

Groups like the people on r/privacy are making the Google Analytics toolset less viable. This is because many of tools like Google Container for Firefox and some add-ons block it entirely. When we visit a site that relies on that toolset, we're basically invisible.

That's not a massive number of people but let's say you're trying to connect with developers, folks that are high tech, or the privacy-conscious? At that point, you might as well just monitor your server logs for activity data. They'll be much more accurate. Certainly don't pay for Google's advanced analytics services.

More on this topic: https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-adblockers-missing-data

Interesting and I shopped for the very service recently (for bolddata.org ) but ended up with plausible.io. They seem a bit cheaper on the lower end which might be a challenge? Pricing?

If you just started matomo you might want to check plausible too. It's still kind of new and does an excellent job. I have been using for over a year now and it works perfectly and I thinks it's a much better alternative to GA and matomo.

https://plausible.io/

I really like this initiative (like plausible.io). But the price tag on this is too high for me. I have a very small (<30 visits/month) website, and I like to have these analytics. But spending that much on it is inconceivable to me.

>For everything else there are other solutions.

The issue is that, while there are always alternatives, they aren't realistic alternatives.

Not every website can run it's own copy of plausible.io instead of just slapping a cookie accept button and using google analytics.

So we still end up with the issue at hand. These privacy concerns simply cannot be done on the website level, but should instead be done on the browser level or higher. All the cookie law did was put a bunch of banners nobody checks everywhere.

Which technically exist. You can always just fire up Incognito, or launch a new Chrome Profile. And Chrome is planning to block third party cookies by 2023 (should have been this year but.. eh, google and their ads), and Safari has done so since 2020, you might have seen those messages in Safari about keeping you safe.

Horny category is the most visited one... 😅

Traffic data is public, check it out https://plausible.io/mood2movie.com

The hidden movies go to your local storage, so you can either delete it or use the app with another device.

Thanks for your feedback 😉

check out plausible.io, its a ga alternative. One of their main selling points is: "No cookies and fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA and PECR".

And you can self host it for free.

umami.is (free and open-source) has similar functionality as https://plausible.io (paid and open source). Yet plausible MRR was something like 68k the last time I've read their post

Tu peux voir les visites sur le site sur https://plausible.io/elo-president.fr?period=month. Il y a l'origine des visites et le type de device. Et oui la majorité des visites se sont faites sur mobile 😭

This alternative is interesting https://plausible.io/#pricing and since they still use the utm_source you can still track campaigns. The key way they side step the legislation is they don't collect PII - so they cannot track journeys or individual visits to a user.

This takes me back to the old days of just having a 'tracking pixel' and then you save all the hits in a database and aggregate daily to create daily stats.

Plausible let's you self host for free. You can choose where you want to store your data. I store my data in the EU (Germany - Hetzner). Been using it for a while now and it's a great product. https://plausible.io/

All site data plausible.io stores on behalf of their customers is hosted in Germany on servers owned by Hetzner, a European-owned company. Previously it was hosted by Digital Ocean in Germany but the move to Hetzner was made last year.

Heb je ooit naar alternatieven voor Google Analytics gekeken? Er zijn meerdere privacy-georienteerde analytics providers. Deze zijn over het algemeen niet gratis, maar de kosten zijn relatief laag voor kleine volumes (9 euro voor 10,000 pageviews, 12 euro voor 100,000 pageviews). Google Analytics is misschien dan wel een goedkopere optie, maar dit gaat ten koste van de privacy van je gebruikers. Ik vind het niet verkeerd dat er wat tegen gedaan wordt.

AFAIK Plausible doesn't collect anything, IP included. So they say in their docs:

> We look up the visitor’s location using their IP address. We do not track anything more granular than the city level and the IP address of the visitor is discarded. We never store IP addresses in our database or logs.

> should be cheap/free at first and GDPR conform, i dont want to display any annoying messages.

https://usefathom.com/ https://plausible.io/ (a little more expensive)

I'd be happy to use them, they're very well done. They're too pricey for me (50 domains to track would make them absurdly expensive) but I've been using them for a few clients.

Google Analytics is often mandatory if the client also has a SEO agency who helps them.

Matomo (self-hosted) is usually ok if you want a free tool, despite it being extremely slow and "ugly" (it looks outdated).

Indeed, but analytics platforms such as Plausible do not require notices as they do not collect any personal information (i.e. user "data").

Matomo would require a notice, by default, since it does use cookies, but seems that it can be configured to require no notice.

https://plausible.io/vs-matomo#privacy-regulations-and-the-need-for-cookie-notices-and-gdpr-or-ccpa-consent

If you’re looking for tracking user analytics, there’s a few different privacy-conscious services out there.

I personally use Fathom Analytics, though if you don’t want to pay a subscription you can self host Plausible Analytics

Paid ads are great if you've honed your messaging and basically want to fuel your growth.

When you first launch your MVP, you're usually far from that point. At this stage, you want to research where ro find your users.

As an example, my startup's target customers are web developers. They congregate in places such as HN, various subreddits, lobsters, devto and similar forums.

Then, find something they'll find valuable and share with them. This is usually content marketing (blog posts), but needs to be useful and relevant. Share the content and otherwise engage in the community (comment on relevant topics, etc).

This brings them to you but still doesn't shove your product down their throats.

Slowly you'll build incoming links, brand recognition in your specific niche, and users. This is a slow process and it takes a time for it to get up to speed. Think flywheel, not a rocket launch.

An interesting recent case study from plausible.io is a great example from this. And you can see it in action right now: I found it useful and am sharing it.

Cold email is numbers game. You'll need to send hundreds or thousands of mails to see any effect. It might work if you have great leads, but I'm skeptical of nailing the email at this point in the startup lifecycle. At least, it didn't work for us.

I personally will go with the first option. I remember plausible doing something similar when migrated to AGPLv3 (see https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses).

side note: Another license you may want to consider is the Elasticsearch/Mongo SSPL (https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license/faq)

I try to avoid using any google product, whenever I can, especially analytics - but instead of building my own (which you could with many different aws products), might want to look into plausible.io - free and open source (if you host it yourself), or very small monthly charge to use the hosted version - (and there may be other options as well).

Doesn't collect as much data as google-analytics does (which is a good thing imo), but it is just as simple - perhaps even easier - to use. (Just drop a code snippet into your pages).

Does a lot more than just collect page views, but isn't as creepy as using google analytics and turning over all of your user data to an mega evil corporation.

Gibt auch alternativen wie Plausible die keine Cookies nutzen und DSGVO konform sind. Das speichert nur grundlegendste Infos wie wann welche Seite, Land, Browser und ob Handy oder Laptop. Es wird also wenn dann das Massenverhalten und kein individuelles Verhalten gespeichert.

Ich hoffe echt, dass solche Methoden zunehmen und nicht die Großen weiterhin über andere Methoden stalken...

Any theme can be SEO friendly as long as it has the proper meta tags and is snappy. Google is putting a lot of weight into page experience now: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/11/timing-for-page-experience?hl=en - so bloated and slow sites aren't going to have a good time.

AMP is no longer preferred by google: https://plausible.io/blog/google-amp

These are very valid points. I don't think I'd open source it anytime soon as I'd have a hard time also managing a public repo. I do want to open source the different tools and libraries I make along the way though.

Concerning privacy, the only analytics used is Plausible.io, a privacy friendly tool.

I'm really glad that you like the app so far, I promise to keep supporting it for the foreseeable future as I myself use it, but like all the abandoned projects out there, it can be a tough promise to believe.

Plausible is our analytics tool.

https://plausible.io/

Blocking it shouldn't interfere with site functionality. The second blocked link is the API call for the carousel of featured manga on the front page, and I have no idea why that's being blocked. See if it's blocking the entire API. subdomain.

I haven't used them personally. The alternative I hear a lot of good buzz around is Plausible, from a privacy and simplicity perspective.

GA gets a lot of negativity, but I actually like it. They took the feedback that the UI is too complex and made some great improvements in GA4. It's actually pretty sweet, simple & intuitive from first glance, but has the option to become much more complex + configurable for the power users. I do tend to use some of the more advanced features like setting up my own dashboards, so it fits my needs. Plus, I'm big on free tools considering that my ventures are all bootstrapped.

You can check the stats of my blog here: https://plausible.io/peterdev.pl

It's funny that my top 2 articles are not related to Java, but to PHP ;) The third one is about IntelliJ settings, and another Java article is on #5.

I also checked search keywords for my Java articles in the Google Search Console. If you're not using it yet, you should start, so you know what people are looking for and how your page performs. For example, I know that people are finding my BigDecimal article, but it's usually on the 2nd or 3rd page of search results.

There are plenty of analytics softwares. In the 90% case, the massive amount of info google analytics gathers is overkill; most businesses just want to see how their pages are performing, and where they're getting referrals from. For those cases, there are lightweight, cookieless options like Fathom (mostly open source) and Plausible (open source) that have minimal performance impact. And even if you do need more than referral/page info, Matomo (also open source) has GA levels of functionality.

I think google analytics has it's place, but I also think it's a shame it's synonymous with the **only** option for analytics.

I also really like Plausible. What I find very cool is the ability to share the collected data publicly. I feel like it builds trust, if your users can see, what data you collect. Here are Plausible's stats for example: https://plausible.io/plausible.io

server logs are inaccurate. they show 18x higher numbers for page views than client side analytics. see for instance this comparison with data I collected on my own sites: https://plausible.io/blog/server-log-analysis

But Vercel does provide limited access logs:
https://vercel.com/knowledge/how-do-i-store-logs-on-vercel
(at least HTTP 200 responses for static assets, no HTTP 404 or 304)

However server log analysis make for poor analytics:
https://plausible.io/blog/server-log-analysis

I'm working on Plausible Analytics. Modern dashboard, simple metrics to understand, open source (can be self-hosted too), lightweight script (<1 KB), no cookies and doesn't collect personal data. You can read more here: https://plausible.io

Hi,

it could be worthwhile to separate the tracking script from your main domain (and therefore also your blog). I am using Adguard Home in my network to block tracking scripts and ads, but since your tracking script is served at https://plausible.io/js/plausible.js I cannot visit your domain at all.

Your domain is blocked by https://adguardteam.github.io/AdGuardSDNSFilter/Filters/filter.txt

We generate a daily changing identifier using the visitor’s IP address and User Agent. To anonymize these datapoints, we run them through a hash function with a rotating salt.

hash(daily_salt + website_domain + ip_address + user_agent)

This generates a random string of letters and numbers that is used to calculate unique visitor numbers for the day. Old salts are deleted to avoid the possibility of linking visitor information from one day to the next.

See full details here: https://plausible.io/data-policy

ah thanks for letting me know! sorry! Plausible is a fully open source product that people can self-host completely for free. there's the cloud version too as most people want analytics to be maintained by someone else as Google Analytics has made that the default mode for most site owners. only few sites self-host analytics.

you can read about both cloud and self-hosted on the website: https://plausible.io/ or check out our github directly https://github.com/plausible/analytics

Good to see a giant company entering the privacy first analytics space - should bring some awareness to this issue to more site owners.

If you're looking for an independent and open source alternative, I'm working on Plausible Analytics. Modern dashboard, simple metrics to understand, open source and can be self-hosted, lightweight script (<1 KB), no cookies and doesn't collect personal data so no need for cookie/GDPR consent banner.

See https://plausible.io/

Good to see a giant company entering the privacy first analytics space - should bring some awareness to this issue to more site owners.

If you're looking for an independent and open source alternative, I'm working on Plausible Analytics. Modern dashboard, simple metrics to understand, open source and can be self-hosted, lightweight script (<1 KB), no cookies and doesn't collect personal data so no need for cookie/GDPR consent banner.

See https://plausible.io/

Thank you u/an0ns3c9 for checking it out. I am actually still working on my improved landing page. Sorry about that. I will have it probably by the end of this week.

My way of getting visitor information is like how Plausible.io does it. Right now I only collect 4 data points:

1. HTTP Referrer
2. Browser
3. Device Type
4. Country

After I run your HTTP User-Agent and IP Address to get these 4 data points, I disregard it and don't store this information anywhere on the system.

I like the model of plausible and I am planning to open-source it soon too. Just adding more tests and making it easier to run.

Right now it is actually free with no limits. I just added the 30-day trial because I plan to add billing within this month.

Plausible Analytics has a cloud version where things are managed and hosted for you in exchange for a fee. That's this one: https://plausible.io

There's a free as in beer self-hosted version of Plausible Analytics too where you have to install and manage it on your own server. Take a look at https://plausible.io/blog/self-hosted-web-analytics-beta

Instructions are here: https://github.com/plausible/analytics/blob/master/HOSTING.md

Plausible Analytics has a cloud version where things are managed and hosted for you in exchange for a fee. That's this one: https://plausible.io

There's a free as in beer self-hosted version of Plausible Analytics too where you have to install and manage it on your own server. Take a look at https://plausible.io/blog/self-hosted-web-analytics-beta

Instructions are here: https://github.com/plausible/analytics/blob/master/HOSTING.md

Plausible Analytics has a cloud version where things are managed and hosted for you in exchange for a fee.

There's a free as in beer self-hosted version of Plausible Analytics too where you have to install and manage it on your own server. Take a look at https://plausible.io/blog/self-hosted-web-analytics-beta

Instructions are here: https://github.com/plausible/analytics/blob/master/HOSTING.md

While this was a great AMA, it still annoys me that The Intercept has such great privacy articles yet still uses Google Analytics. It's not as if it's the only option.

Interesting to see that when split down, Arch itself is the most popular amongst GOL readers.

You can also see GOL traffic stats here for now: https://plausible.io/gamingonlinux.com Probably won't continue past their free trial, far too expensive and their self-hosted solution sounds like it's not ready.

https://plausible.io is what I've used for the last year. It's a lot more privacy conscious of your users.

It's definitely more basic that Google Analytics, but I have pretty basic needs. And it's not free, but pretty reasonable; I use one subscription to cover a few different sites.

Don't use google ads, there is a FOSS alternative but i'm not remembering the name right now.

Ways of making money

• Educational content
• SaaS model
• Premium version with additional features and expanded functionality
• Training, support or consulting services from the project’s maintainers
• Crowdfunding, voluntary donations and sponsorship
• Progressive discount
• Merchandising
• Grants

Notes

• Build a project good enough and a community that care about your project enough that they are willing to pay.
• Produce software that is truly useful. Build an audience (you can build a great tool but it means nothing if no one’s paying attention to you. Social media followers, email subscribers, etc... are a valuable asset)
• Align your Business model with something people are willing to pay for (create a project aligned with something people or businesses believe in so much or find value in that they are willing to pay for, and fund continuous development and ensure sustainability)
• Charge an impactful amount (a common mistake is offering too small of a first tier. If people have the option of paying less, they will choose it.)
• Get the most people possible engaged: More users, more revenue, more great people you can hire, better software, more users, so on...
• User Governance: Let users choose the features you should focus on (polls, feedback)
• When you try to rise money, know specifically why you are doing it and What specifically are you going to fund?
• Ask your costumers what are their biggest challenges.
• When you start focusing on the money first, you’re always going to lose out.

References

• https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-funding
• https://calebporzio.com/i-just-hit-dollar-100000yr-on-github-sponsors-heres-how-i-did-it
• https://medium.com/open-collective/funding-open-source-how-webpack-reached-400k-year-dfb6d8384e19

A lot of success for your projects.

I'm working on Plausible Analytics:

Modern dashboard, simple metrics to understand, open source, lightweight script (<1 KB), no cookies doesn't collect personal data

We tried to make our plans affordable. Plans start at $6/month or $4/month on annual plans. Unlike Google Analytics, our cloud product is not free as in beer because our business model is subscriptions rather than selling the data of your visitors. We're bootstrapped without any external funding so the subscription fees help us cover our costs and time spent on development etc

https://plausible.io/

I'm working on Plausible Analytics:

• Modern dashboard,
• simple metrics to understand,
• open source,
• lightweight script (<1 KB),
• no cookies
• doesn't collect personal data

We tried to make our plans affordable. Plans start at $6/month or $4/month on annual plans. Unlike Google Analytics, our cloud product is not free as in beer because our business model is subscriptions rather than selling the data of your visitors. We're bootstrapped without any external funding so the subscription fees help us cover our costs and time spent on development etc

https://plausible.io/

I personally use Plausible (https://plausible.io/) because my visitor's privacy is more important to me than tracking them.

Matomo is better than GA as it can be configured not to track, but it doesn't do that out of the box.

Love this initiative and thanks for all that work!

I'm working on one of the Google Analytics open source alternatives that's listed on that Switching.social page you linked to (Plausible Analytics). There's no easy self-hosting now but we're expecting the alpha version to be ready this month (see details on Github).

Recently I published a post on "Why you should stop using Google Analytics on your website" and it was shared widely on Hacker News, Lobsters, Mastodon and so on. More than 85,000 visitors by now so there's definitely some interest in a change!

Friends don’t let friends use Google Analytics.

Love this initiative and thanks for all that work!

I'm working on one of the Google Analytics alternatives that's listed on that Switching.social page you linked to (Plausible Analytics). There's no easy self-hosting now but we're expecting the alpha version to be ready this month (see details on Github).

Recently I published a post on "Why you should stop using Google Analytics on your website" and it was shared widely on Hacker News, Lobsters, Mastodon and so on. More than 85,000 visitors by now so there's definitely some interest in a change!

Friends don’t let friends use Google Analytics.

Out of those two, I think SA is better since it collects a bit less data.

Overall though, I would take a look at Fathom and Plausible to see if they fit your needs. Neither of these use cookies to track users (which makes GDRP a non issue), they track less data, they're a bit cheaper, and in Plausibles case, they're open source.

>What model do you like better, a blaringly obvious opt-out button for the analytics, or a couple percentage-points discount on the product if you opt-in to analytics (which would not on by default in this case)?

Opt in every time. I would never opt in but I'm a firm believer in opt in only for analytics for the general masses

Thanks!

We look up the visitor’s country using the IP address. We do not track anything more granular than the country of origin and the IP address of the visitor is discarded. We never store IP addresses in our database or logs.

Here's how we count unique users https://plausible.io/data-policy#how-we-count-unique-users-without-cookies

Thanks for bringing this to our attention! We released a completely new product and website last week and this slipped through.

There's now a new hand-crafted privacy policy that goes into detail on what we track from our website visitors and from our customers. You can see that at https://plausible.io/privacy

There's also a new data policy page that goes into detail on what information we track on behalf of our customers who install our web analytics script on their websites. That one is on https://plausible.io/data-policy#first-thing-first-what-we-collect-and-what-we-use-it-for

Thanks again!

Take a look at Plausible Analytics as a Google Analytics alternative too. It's open-source, has a modern dashboard, simple metrics to use/understand (including unique visitors, page views, bounce rates, top pages, referral sources etc), lightweight script of 1.4 KB, doesn't use cookies and doesn't collect personal data so compliant with GDPR and you don't need to show those banners/popups to get consent for cookies or for GDPR. See https://plausible.io

Yeah.

I'd love to support this in principle, but they just use it to promote their own stuff:

https://plausible.io/blog/remove-google-analytics#give-plausible-analytics-a-try

It's still a dysfunct market since Google overshadows the competitors.

Take a look at Plausible Analytics as a Google Analytics alternative. It's open-source, has a modern dashboard, simple metrics to use/understand (including unique visitors, page views, bounce rates, top pages, referral sources etc), lightweight script of 1.4 KB, doesn't use cookies and doesn't collect personal data so compliant with GDPR and you don't need to show those banner/popups to get consent for cookies or for GDPR. See https://plausible.io

I was looking for a similar service a couple months back but I didn't find anything I liked. So I've started building a lightweight, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics. I don't track user countries yet but that's coming in the next few weeks.

Check it out: https://plausible.io

Live demo: https://plausible.io/plausible.io

Name: Plausible

Location: London, UK

Pitch: Overwhelmed by Google Analytics? Looking for something more privacy-friendly? I'm building Plausible to provide a simpler alternative that's easy to use and respects your users' privacy.

Stage: Public free beta. Working towards v1 which launches in May.

Looking for:

• Feedback on the produt.
• Potentially interested users.