Analytics
Definition
Measuring how a site or product is used — visits, pages, sources, events — and reading the measurements as evidence of behavior rather than as a scoreboard
Privacy-first here: Fathom counts readers without cookies or fingerprinting, events are named actions with no properties attached, and the numbers come back into the garden through a read-only API as its own charts. What is not collected — identities, cross-site trails — is part of the definition, because it is what lets the privacy page make its one-sentence promise.
Counting what people do so the next decision has a number behind it. The discipline is in choosing what not to count, and in reading a change in the numbers back to a change on the site — which is what milestones and named events are for.