DE version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
73% Positive
Analyzed from 1939 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#posthog#product#open#self#don#source#analytics#repo#things#hosted
Discussion (48 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
COSS works well when there is a large distribution advantage of being OSS. This could be bacuse a large portion of users (need to) self-host the solution. This is true for databases, people will always need to self-host dbs (e.g. as part of their docker compose in dev, etc...). These people are also hard core engineers that will 1) talk about the db and 2) contribute to the project. So an OSS db have a large network effects and distribution advantage.
Posthog had a distribution advantage from OSS in their beginnings -- their beachhead was the self-hosting oss community. Now, it does not add much value -- It's unlikely Github adds much for their distribution. So, it does not make sense for them to do much more than just maintain it lightly. In fact, they try to push you from self-hosting by having great free tiers and startup programs.
In their rationale for this:
> We also learned that the tools to do that automation just don't exist. We kept finding new failure modes. When onboarding a new customer we would have to vet their engineering team for Kubernetes experience so that we'd be confident they could help us debug issues in their PostHog deploy. Folks that didn't have infra experience would often be able to get something set up, only to get stuck when something went wrong.
I empathize that this is a sane choice for PostHog to make as a business. But - if you can't deploy and dogfood your changes, are you truly able to maintain a fork with customizations? And if you can't use your own changes, is the software open-source, or source-available?
Perhaps the punchline is that any scalable & performant web analytics platform must necessarily be a distributed system of ingestion and storage services, and that complexity is like oil and water with the classic "you should be able to swap out the dependencies on your systems with ones you fork" open-source ethos.
PostHog had an opportunity to break this trend, to innovate and invest in those automations they correctly said didn't exist - and I was cheering them on. I've been saddened to see them move in the opposite direction.
It's still great to make the code open, but it's not usable anymore for a self-hosted setup.
But now AI screwed them over so they come with their own open-source spaghetti.
I think is a bit of product slopification.
To each his own though.
IDK what the prior AI behaviors have been, but for me, what they have now is an ~idealized version of AI product.
It is basically what I'd do if they didn't offer it but not as well: export data, import their docs in md., import some industry best practices in analytics into context etc.
Except its all right there. Not sure of the economics of it, as it was on a free account and some reasonably good model was powering the discussion. But it was about as engaged as I've been with an analytics tool.
Also i don't like how "People" is not buried in data now, pretty sure this was just in the left hand bar. I can "star" it, but its still nested in a wierd UI drawer. I wish it was pinned by default, or a way I could re-pin it.
A message of some kind (You may have already done this) to accept the new defaults or keep the some of the original defaults would of been cool.
On a broader note, I loved the simplicity of what you guys made, and it feels like the product has too many moving pieces available to me. I build my own product as well and I get the rub here, you want to support so many more use cases and re-organize things to do so , but in the end it feels bloated. I love the idea of using AI and in some cases when i needed to mine my data some it was super nice, though most of the time from a founder perspective I'm looking at largely the same data/metrics over and over, and don't need to be creating new graphs every day. So the launchpad /w chatbox as the primary thing as a default feels a bit lost on me.
All that said, I still looooove your product and would still use it 1100 times over GA any day. <3
I also agree that the nav, structure, and defaults changing keep being un-intuitive and are making it harder to find the things that I use and that matter to me and my orgs.
That has changed though. Last time I used PH, I found myself not finding the things I needed so ended up connecting the mcp and asking claude to change things for me.
MCP was a nice addition, so thanks for that. The problem of mcp is that it prevents product discoverability. You are adding many things lately and since I'm using the MCP for my "part of the job" I will never visit your site anymore and see what's new.
On the server side, queue all analytics call and run them after the main request completes (on next.js it would be within an after() function on the server side).
You can paste this comment into Claude and it should handle the refactor just fine.
Note with the changes in analytics scheduling, you will lose out on real time analytics in favor of better time to first load. So keep the trade-off in mind.
Please update title accordingly.
Presumably so folks can be sure they're not accidentally pulling in proprietary code.
> This repo is available under the MIT expat license, except for the ee directory (which has its license here) if applicable.
> Need absolutely 100% FOSS? Check out our posthog-foss repository, which is purged of all proprietary code and features.
Source: I was there
To clarify: PostHog has been MIT licensed since day 1, with the exception of the `ee/` folder. This `posthog-foss` repo is a mirror of the main `posthog` repo with the `ee/` folder removed. We've had it for ages.
That's an odd request. I always use my own voice for certain things, such as posting to hacker news, or writing my thoughts on a proposal. But for other things such as writing up a bugfix, if I'm getting an AI to write it, I'd rather not hide the fact I've done so.
In fact I usually go out my way to mark it as AI written, to give a heads up to any human reader so they don't waste their time if they don't want to read it.
edit: I'm not sure why my comment is attracting downvotes, perhaps it's being interpreted as anti-AI. I'm not against AI writing, but there are contexts where people would like to know whether something is AI written or not. I would rather it was well identified than hidden, so people can make their own judgement whether to gain insight into a human writing or whether it's just process they can skim or feed through their own agent.
"Avoid em-dashes" just seems like a crude attempt to avoid AI writing coming across as such.
I feel I'm missing some basics as to what this can do for me or what problem it solves.
edit so it's like google analytics .
I remember applying sometime ago, not really knowing what they did. They then spammed me with marketing mail, now they're open-sourced and had received a (supposedly marketing) job posting?
Granted in this entire history I had no idea what their product was. Seems flakey, but I haven't used it.