Removing stats altogether is certainly an option, but one of my motivating factors for expanding and working on my personal site is to write articles that people find interesting or helpful. Stats are one of the best ways to identify what those things are.
Rolling my own or self-hosting is also an option, but breaks my current flow which is based around using an SSG and hosting only static assets which can be CDNified. My intention with my site design is not to require any sort of dynamic structure or backend services, everything is just static HTML, CSS, and JS. As such, things like comments, analytics, etc are most easily integrated via a SaaS.
Given that GoatCounter doesn't use cookies, doesn't do any cross-site tracking, and provides me controls to limit what data is collected and how long it's retained, it seems a fair option given my constraints. I'm open to other alternatives, but I don't think it's a reasonable or tenable position to say that people shouldn't have website stats. Fundamentally the stats I'm collecting are basically the same information which would be contained in a http server log, hardly egregious, and something any user should expect to be collected if you're connecting to a server on the open internet.
Rolling my own or self-hosting is also an option, but breaks my current flow which is based around using an SSG and hosting only static assets which can be CDNified. My intention with my site design is not to require any sort of dynamic structure or backend services, everything is just static HTML, CSS, and JS. As such, things like comments, analytics, etc are most easily integrated via a SaaS.
Given that GoatCounter doesn't use cookies, doesn't do any cross-site tracking, and provides me controls to limit what data is collected and how long it's retained, it seems a fair option given my constraints. I'm open to other alternatives, but I don't think it's a reasonable or tenable position to say that people shouldn't have website stats. Fundamentally the stats I'm collecting are basically the same information which would be contained in a http server log, hardly egregious, and something any user should expect to be collected if you're connecting to a server on the open internet.