Yunohost analytics

[Salamandar]

So i'm sure you already thought of that but let's have a discussion about this.

The idea is to publicly provide statistics about:

• Number of (alive) Yunohost instances
• The platform/hardware/install method (vm, debian+yunohost, yunohost iso, ARM/x86, idk)
• The Yunohost version (useful to know which API can be deprecated/deleted)
• Maybe some system info (total disk size for /, total RAM are the 2 that come in mind)
• Number of domains ?
• System locale or IP country code

And also about the apps:

• Total number of apps
• Version of each app (also very useful to know about upgrade support)

This would provide some info to the maintainers:

• Which apps would require support/help in priority
• Stats for users "which app is the most used for a mail client ?"
• Deprecated APIs could be deleted knowing how few very-old instances would be impacted
• Know which locales to translate Yunohost to
• etc.

Of course, the most important thing to keep in mind is that privacy is important to Yunohost users, and the collected info should not allow to identify a single instance/domain.

Another self-hosted project has already "solved" this problem : Home Assistant.
Here's the public analytics dashboard : https://analytics.home-assistant.io/#installations
And here is the documentation : https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/analytics
They do not provide single instance information, but only aggregated information. That means that they can't know which apps are often installed together, for example.

What do you think about all that ? That would need 2 developments :

• The instances should ping a server with the list of the infos. They should probably only ping regularly, and not when an info changes (e.g not when an app is installed). They should have a unique ID to prevent duplicates. It could be derived from a hardware ID that is never exposed to the network, or a random key stored in the Yunohost config.
• Either relying on Cloudflare KV like Home Assistant or not, a website providing graphical info would be developped.

[tituspijean]

Related issue: #1670

[Salamandar]

Hah, thanks. I didn't know if issue or discussion was the best place to talk about it.