Privacy

RSS feeds never went away. Most blogs, news sites, forums, and even a lot of YouTube channels and subreddits still publish one, whether or not they advertise it on the page. What disappeared was the easy on-ramp, Google Reader shut down over a decade ago and nothing free and centralized ever fully replaced it as the default. The gap got filled by a handful of paid hosted services (Feedly, Inoreader) and by self-hosting, and for a homelab operator the self-hosted path has a real advantage beyond just avoiding a subscription: your reading list, read/unread state, and starred articles stay on hardware you control, not in a third party’s analytics pipeline. FreshRSS, Miniflux, and Tiny Tiny RSS (TT-RSS) are the three tools that consistently come up, and they land in genuinely different places on the simplicity-versus-features spectrum. ...

If you’re running any kind of self-hosted site, a blog, a Lemmy instance, a Nextcloud share page, you eventually want to know who’s showing up and what they’re looking at. The default answer most people reach for is Google Analytics, which is free, well-documented, and also means routing every visitor’s browsing behavior through Google’s ad infrastructure, adding a consent-banner requirement under GDPR/CCPA in a lot of jurisdictions, and accepting a tracking script bloated enough that privacy-focused browser extensions block it outright, quietly undercounting your own numbers. For a homelab operator who’s already self-hosting everything else, self-hosting analytics too is a natural next step. Plausible, Umami, and Matomo are the three real options, and they are not interchangeable. ...

Google Photos used to be the easy answer: unlimited storage, decent search, an app that just worked. That deal is gone, storage now counts against your Google One quota, prices have crept up, and the underlying trade was always the same one every free cloud photo service makes: your entire photo library, including the ones you’d rather not have scanned by an ad-tech company’s ML pipeline, lives on someone else’s servers under someone else’s terms. Immich and PhotoPrism are the two projects that have actually closed the gap between “self-hosted” and “something you’d trust with 15 years of family photos.” Picking between them comes down to a few real differences, not just which one has a nicer logo. ...

Browser extensions block ads on the device they’re installed on. A phone that isn’t running one, a smart TV, a game console, a guest’s laptop on your Wi-Fi, none of that gets covered. Network-level DNS blocking fixes that by sitting between every device on your network and the internet, and refusing to resolve requests to known ad and tracker domains before they ever load. It’s one of the easiest wins in self-hosting: low resource cost, immediate and visible results, and it protects every device on the network without touching a single one of them individually. Pi-hole and AdGuard Home are the two dominant tools for doing this yourself, and picking between them comes down to a handful of real differences, not just branding. ...