You can do this with server side logs.

You don’t need to track users to get this insight, you can get all that insight from tracking server requests.

You may ask what’s the difference. Well, if I track you with in browser tech I can see everything you do.

If I look at the logs I’ll most likely just see a load of people from a single IP at your ISP which is a reverse proxy cache.

I’m fine with that. I don’t run any tracking, but I do look at logs now and again.

This is true if you host your blog on a webserver under your control. If you host from platforms like GitHub pages, this is not an option.

perfect answer tbh just scrap server logs. sites that offer blogging capabilities as service should do that for their users and provide 'local analytics'. its really trivial to do :/ u get tons of info. if u need more a lot of webservers can also dish out additional logs for you. applications can also be trivially configured to track such things themselves at near 0 cost and effort.

hell, theres ready to use log collectors that will give u even nice dashboarding capabilities if you want to provide more fancy offerings in analytics. if ppl like that so much isnt it an easy sell? non invasive analytics?

(should be noted some platforms do this ofc.. :) )