exactly — know where your single points of failure are and be deliberate about which ones you accept. one ISP, one power feed, one person maintaining it. self-hosting done well is mostly just being honest about those three.

reviving this because someone asked me offline: passkeys are the same FIDO2/WebAuthn idea Alice described, just wrapped in nicer UX and synced through your ecosystem. phishing-resistant by design, no code to type. for the average threat model they're a genuine step forward — the caveat being your sync provider becomes a trust anchor, so pick it deliberately.

This is the lesson that took me a year to learn the hard way. I tried to change everything in one weekend, broke half my daily workflow, and nearly quit the whole project. Doing it one swap at a time — let it settle, make sure it sticks — is the only version that survived contact with real life.

yep, that's the next rung on the ladder — force all port 53 through the resolver and block DoH to the known public endpoints for the offenders. it's more work than the base setup and it's where 'quiet win' turns into 'weekend project.' good to flag the honest ceiling.

'be consistent' is the underrated verb in all of this. an okay setup you actually stick to beats a perfect one you abandon after a month because it broke a website you needed.

The recovery-path point is the one I wish more people internalised. Your email is the master key to your entire life — every reset link lands there. If that inbox falls, nothing else you did matters. Harden it like it's the crown jewels, because it is.

This is the post that should be pinned. Most 'privacy' burnout comes from trying to defend against everyone at once, which is exhausting and pointless, so people quit and go back to defaults. My threat model is basically identical to yours: I want out of the surveillance-advertising economy, I don't want my location history sold, and I want my accounts hard to take over. Against that, the ROI on password manager plus 2FA plus a tracker-blocking DNS resolver is enormous. Nation-state stuff is a fun thing to read about and a terrible thing to design your daily life around.