I did it for a few months and really enjoyed it. At the end of 3 months, I realized I could achieve nearly the same thing by turning off all notifications except messages and calls and uninstalling all social media. I realized… if I have the willpower to use a dumbphone I have the willpower to keep the distraction off my smartphone. Phone usage is now 100% intentional with the right setup.

I did it for 3 months. I really enjoyed my time doing it and learned a lot about my usage. It was a cheap $50 experiment. After I went back to my smartphone, I uninstalled ALL social media apps. Turned off ALL notifications but left calls and messages as an exception. My smartphone is now essentially a feature phone. It’s not 100% the same since the big screen does lure you in to use it but my usage is still way down and because I don’t have any social media there’s no reason for me to be on my phone around other people. I wholeheartedly recommend trying it for those curious.

Can this work with the “off the shelf” mesh routers.

Yeah but can it host PiHole?

We have so much computing power at home and the chances you have good reliable Internet at home are better than before. I revived 5 year old PCs and it’s way too much computing power for my self host needs. I’d have to pay $200+ a month for the same compute power in the cloud. Even a Raspberry Pi with 8GB is capable of running quite a bit for fractions of a penny in electricity.

There’s so many services where I’m like, wow what am I even paying for? Email is one where I know exactly what I’m paying for.

Does it support syncing photos from your phone? That’s the only thing I need to get off Google Photos, I love how seamless it is.

I didn’t realize how broken SearX was until I switched to SearXNG.

Likely because the apps need access to the host and the policies were likely blocking it since it’s non-interactive.

You can secure your tunnels using the Access menu and then adding an application. It should be somewhat straight-forward but you’re basically looking to create an access policy and then adding the rules you want. For example a simple one is to add an allow rule for certain emails. When you enter your email an access code will be sent to you before you can access the application resource. That’s just one of many ways to secure it using their application config and access policies.

If you’re comfortable with using Cloudflare, you can use their zero trust tunneling and setup an application layer that adds auth to those services. I have mine protected by my GitHub login.

No apologies needed! Cheers!

Are you comfortable in command line? There’s psql or there’s https://www.pgadmin.org/

Oh yeah, not meaning to hate on your suggestion, just giving a fair warning to those who are looking to take the plunge. I consider myself advanced and librewolf drove me crazy for a few days but stuck with it and found a balance of settings that I like.

The biggest example of this is YouTube. Sometimes it runs fine but sometimes videos just don’t load or freeze.

The default settings of librewolf would drive the average user crazy. I’m not a fan of Firefox and use Librewolf myself but Firefox has sensible defaults for an average user that would be a net positive coming from Chrome. Just an FYI thinking of making the switch.

For additional context of those curious, Librewolf is very hardened by default. When you close your browser all site data is wiped (this can be turned off). Most people don’t mess with their browser settings though… there’s also a lot of little things that are disabled by default that will make people think the browser is broken e.g. canvas requests are silently denied by default, it’s just not realistic for most people to use librewolf.

Have you tried logging in with a simple postgres client?

Look under the Zero Trust category and then once there you’ll see another menu item called Access. There you’ll find Tunnels, in addition to Tunnels you can add an Application in the same Access menu to create policies that only allow certain clients to connect.

If you only need public access to things like HTTP or SSH you don’t necessarily need to run dynamic ip and just setup Cloudflare Tunnels. So far I haven’t needed to put anything public that doesn’t run on the provided tunnels.

This is how I got a career in Software Engineering, literally had a strong motivation to build a clan website for my Counter-Strike 1.6 crew and I just ended up learning by maintaining self-hosted websites, forums, and voip. Kept doing it over and over by building other projects and then realized people pay for this skill…