I fell down the rabbit hole of self hosting, some stuff had happened at my place so I had nothing to do real fast. I have a bunch of pis running all kinds of things, I am waiting on a hand me down Mac mini, that I will install Debian on and get a third party solution set up. I currently use adblock plus in Librewolf to block youtube ads on a pi 5 hooked up to my TV. I self host my blog, because hey why not? I self host vaultwarden, I do not want someone other than myself to accidentally leave the doors open to my passwords (which is why I have hardened it so much)! I selfhost my calendars and contacts, why pay someone else to sync those across devices? I have the arr suite with Transmission and Jellyfin running, I used to get emails from my ISP saying stop or else law office of who the fuck will spend $10 000’s to sue you for the $100’s you can be sued for in Canada (they used to email me but I have my ISP email send a auto reply saying I do not use this email anymore because it is hosted using exchange) but now they are paper mail. Slowly climming the walls out of Apple’s ecosystem I started using Home Assistant to be less seen by big tech. I self host other things to but I think you get the picture.

Being one with your LAN is great but when you need to leave the sweat embrace of your LAN and travel out into the scary WAN you realize how much you miss those services so you start self hosting Wireguard (or whatever FOSS VPN) to feel the sweet embrace again. I was going to say I self host my email but I had orignally thought it would be a weekend/week long project, when I got into it I just said FUCK no and settled with my new domain server who has the wildcard option my previous provider did not offer (easyDNS I would recommend over HostHero any day of the week they are less expensive and offer so much more). So I agree with you that third party apps are the way to go I unfortunately do not easily have access to third party VPN stuff with my IP needing to be static so that my personal VPN can be accessed, I am sure I could do some firewall and router kung fu to get a VPN to work on the proper vLANs and all that but instead of that I use pihole + unbound to block incoming ads and trackers as I have been for years already. Now that I am using a vanilla install of openWRT on a Flint2 switch instead of just using Apple’s walls, uFw on my pi’s, and a hope and a prayer with my IoT stuff I can proudly say it is all properly vLANed and if there are ever trackers that do manage to get their way into my LAN will have a hard time getting out.

Years ago when I was learning about pihole I made the boo boo of opening port 22 on my ISPs router, and that was a very expensive mistake! So now all but one of my things use a different ssh port, why does one thing still use 22? I have a pi 0 2 that runs crowdsec. Sorry I get excited to talk about the ways I am saying FUCK off to big tech, but I have every intention of using a third party app for my TV I currently use unwatched on my iOS devices but that still uses my google account.