Goatcounter is so minimal that it takes a minute to wrap the brain around, but the good news is that it tracks all access anonymously, which is all I ever wanted (and why I simply have never made real use of Matomo over the years). It is the digital equivalent of a step counter, and acts those counting clickers they use at concerts to track number of attendants.

It is good to confirm people are actually able to access tooling. That is all I need.

X-posted to https://discuss.online/post/46782698

Goatcounter fits that "step counter" niche exactly. A few notes from self-hosting it:

• The single binary with SQLite is genuinely enough for low/medium traffic. SQLite + litestream for backups is the common simple setup; Postgres support exists but is rarely needed.
• The tracking script is ~2KB, works with a strict CSP, and excludes bots by default, so no separate crawler filtering to maintain.
• Add your own IPs to the exclusion list in site settings instead of relying on private-window toggling; the ?filter-small-views dashboard flag also cuts the noise from your own testing.
• If anonymous page counting is all you want, resist bolting on event tracking later — that's the path back to Matomo complexity.

It does one thing and stays out of the way, which is exactly what the OP described.

Right now I've been enjoying learning how to use Goatcounter along with other applications.... it really is flexible and simple enough to put anywhere.

I'd like to gamify goatcounter using ntfy or similar to keep track of milestones, perhaps daily or weekly or whatever.