sicktriple

Invidious likely isn’t profiling you. If it worries you that much, you can stand up your own instance. It seems like a fun project.

That said, you absolutely don’t need to justify your desire for privacy here. I totally understand you. I’ve kind of landed on a “best effort” approach where I just try not to break shit but use as much privacy focuses stuff I can and check if my browser has a randomized fingerprint on EFF’s coveryourtracks.eff.org/, which you should visit. I use Helium and a small number of addons and that’s it.

Here’s the bottom line. You’re not going to be able to disappear on the internet without a massive and cumbersome effort which is not worth it relative to what I am gathering about your threat model. The very first thing you should do when considering privacy is 1. What you want to keep private and 2. Who you are trying to keep it private from. At the end of the day, you sound like me. I want to keep my browsing history and as much of my personal information as private as possible from data brokers, advertisers and my ISP. For that you need a layered approach. 1, VPN with no logs like mullvad. 2, Encrypted or at the very least recursive DNS resolver. 3, A somewhat randomized browser fingerprint. The last one is tricky because it’s actually just impossible. You can use stock librewolf to share your fingerprint with other users but imo that doesn’t work for my use case, as there are some pretty radical changes to the way I would have to use the internet, so I use Helium, which uses fingerprint farbling, and call it a day.

In the end, that works for me. It’s important to remember privacy is a spectrum. There is no such thing as total anonymity, everything you do to make yourself more private is productive and helpful. It’s about assessing your threat model and taking the correct steps, not trying to become a ghost, because that will drive you nuts and your internet browsing experience will be so degraded you might as well not even use it in the first place.

I started both around the same time. I switched careers from being a chef at a pretty high level. Started getting into systems and got engrossed in it. So the selfhosting was just an aspect of my education.

I’m glad that works for you.

In the words of that one guy from Casino: Why take a chance? A VPS is peace of mind for a cup of coffee a month. I like to be sure the things I need to keep safe have as many opportunities to remain that way as possible.

You should not host anything that’s going to be public facing on your home network in 2026, period. Get a cheap German VPS and go nuts with it. There’s simply too much at stake opening up your home router/firewall for such little gain. Plus, being a residential IP behind NAT might just make it straight up impossible.

I host my own email and a matrix server. I would never think of exposing my home network to the internet. I use tailscale to get into the homelab, anything exposed to the net lives somewhere far, far away.

I use netcup for my email and matrix. It’s extremely reasonable.