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Rambler OP wrote

To be fair, I thought about using something to just measure website traffic and in the end, decided against it.

I used to run Piwik as a self-hosted alternative to Google Analytics on other sites in the past, but that still gave me the option to view a ton of data that I didn't really 'need'.

I figured for this site I'll just measure growth on perceived activity and BW use over the course of time. This is the first site I've ran that I've not cared about SEO scores and search rankings, that I've not (over) analyzed data over to try to improve this random metric or that.

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mr4channer wrote

analytics is not "privacy" focused at all

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Rambler OP wrote (edited )

Depends on if it's collecting personal identifying information or not.

Just knowing things like traffic stats, busiest traffic days of the week or times of day, traffic total divided by country of origin or popular pages isn't much of a privacy concern anymore than knowing that at 5PM on a Friday, this particular coffee shop is busy.

Narrowing it down to knowing how many times a particular IP accesses the site, what pages, and what they clicked on to get to that page and what they clicked on to exit, etc... Knowing browser stats, screen resolution, OS, etc... That's the privacy concern. Just like knowing that at 5PM on a Friday, /u/mr4channer is at this busy coffee shop, and he was last week too, and often visits between these hours on these days, and orders this, and pays with that, etc. That's the privacy concern. But just having a general understanding of knowing peak usages isn't, in my opinion.

For what it's worth, I don't do any of that for this site. I do have network graphs at the server level that just tells me how much traffic passes. Can't differentiate between traffic from the various networks that way, besides Lokinet, which the service creates it's own virtual ethernet device so it's graphed separately, but with no data other than the just bandwidth in/out. For the purpose of this site, that's enough. Upvotes/comments, perceived activity and looking at a network graph over the course of time (say 3-6 months) will tell me if there is growth or not.

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