I’ve been running PiHole for awhile, in short it’s your own DNS server that’s configured to block DNS requests to known advertising domains. So when you load a website and it sends a DNS request to PopularAdvertisingCompany.com to load an ad, PiHole blocks the request so the ad can’t be loaded. It’s useful for devices that you can’t put an ad blocker on, like iPhones and smart TVs and such, but can’t block stuff like YouTube ads cause they come from the same domain as the videos themselves.

It also has bonus features like DNS caching which can speed up web browsing.

Any router from a mainstream brand is likely fine, just don’t enable any of their “cloud” BS and don’t use their smartphone app. I’ve had good luck with Asus, they have an app but you don’t have to use it at all.

For security, try to enable WPA3 on your Wi-Fi networks, otherwise WPA2 is probably fine unless you’re being targeted by a government-sponsored hacking operation. Choose a long password for your network.

Once you get it up and running, then worry about DNS and PiHole and VPNs and all that. Don’t get in over your head.

I think Google Voice still gives out a free phone number as long as you tie it to your actual phone number. I used it for Craigslist all the time years ago to avoid giving out my actual number

How long did you wait for it to forward? Dread has been under DDOS siege for years straight, so they have to implement just about the most restrictive mitigation measures possible. These unfortunately mean long wait times.

The Bitcoin thing was a joke about how it uses so much CPU/GPU, it almost feels as if he’s mining crypto for Daddy Gaben.

His actual complaint is that the shaders seem to get recompiled on every game launch, which takes forever, instead of just re-using the ones it compiled previously.

How do you think they can provide their service free of charge? It’s because you are the product, and they likely track your own spending habits. However, I still use them occasionally if I ever want to sign up for a free trial or something similar, because you can put an all-time limit on each card. If my bank offered that feature though, I would just use it instead because my bank (a local credit union) would never track my data.

What Java version do you have? They switched to a much newer version of Java at some point, maybe the old versions of Minecraft are trying to use the new Java and flipping out?

Not to be a downer but… how did people not anticipate this happening? Google is likely going to do everything they can to shut down non-official clients like Piped, since they’re sidestepping all of YouTube’s revenue streams. Hopefully they don’t take the nuclear option and somehow lock down the API and make it much harder to download videos via tools like yt-dlp.