Right. I mean, I looked into this a few years ago when I set it up and just accepted my fate

You should definitely set up pihole but I don’t think it’ll block ads on streaming apps unless I’m wrong and someone can point me to something that explains how I can set that up.

I have a Synology NAS, and while their Synology Photos is really good, it’s no match for Google Photos. It’s not their fault though, any self-hosted solution is going to be harder to share photos and do collaborative albums and such. And Google Photos image and face recognition is just not matched. I backup my entire photo library to Synology Photos but most of them are also in Google Photos for ease of access and sharing.

You may not like this answer but our solution to this is a Google Photos album, locked down so it’s invite only. Paired with a social media vigilance keeping an eye out for unauthorized posts. We’ve only had to treated to kick someone out of the album once. It works well for us. Especially at family events, people post the photos they take too so we have access and they now know not to post on social media.

Signal

Nah. Fuck em. I don’t need iMessage.