Waterwolf I have found removes a lot of the Google bloot that is in Firefox.
For 100% of people who use the internet, for the love of glob either turn off ssh or change the port number! Unless you have a setup for crowdsec, than have one pi or some other SBC with port 22 open.
So for the 99% of people who want to feel as if there are no ads on the internet Waterwolf and uBO is enough.
For the 99% of people who want to block ads and trackers on all devices, in most instances, there is all of the above plus pihole with unbound and a secondary pihole and that will be good enough. And for the love of glob they do not have a “smart” TV attached to their LAN even if it is on its own vLAN.
For the 99% of people, without a static IP, who do not want to feel targeted using searXNG and the above things is good enough. People with a static IP a lot of the search engines rate limit you or just block static IPs from using their API.
For the 99.9% of people who do not want to get, much, spam and block tracking pixels there is all of the above with your own email service, self-hosted (if they are crazy) or hosted with their own domain, with a new address for everything. This can also be used for unlimited free trials but I have only repeated free trials 2 or 3 times! I personally have a wild card setup with my current host so I get the occasional spam email just from bots who randomly find my domain and try to send it something. When that happens I block the address, occasionally domain, from sending me stuff and block anything sent to the address they sent it to. My previous host gave me unlimited emails for some ungodly amount of money and no wildcard so I had to sign in and manually create a new email address for everything sure I did not get the random fishing email sent to a random address but I had to actually plan on giving out my email before hand.
For the 99% of people who want to feel safe on the internet there is all of the above plus OpenWRT, vLANs, etc.
For the 99% of people who want to feel the warm embrace of that security on their LAN there is Wireguard, or something similar that is FOSS, to VPN into their LAN.
I do agree with you that for the 99% of people a uBO, pihole, and router level VPN is enough, I do disagree with pointing to Quad9 is the right answer it should be going to Unbound first. I personally do not use a router level VPN for outgoing traffic because there is no FOSS thing other than TOR and right now I do not have the money for one. I guess I am in the 1% ish of people?
I’ll admit I was in the anti-AI crowd for big projects, though I do use it for homelab tinkering and fine-tuning systems. But recently, someone told Adobe “F U, I’m not paying your tax” and vibe-coded their entire product suite in about a week, then open-sourced it on GitHub. That changed my thinking, I knew it was going to eventually happen the rich can only enshitify for so long before the poor rise up.
Talented people are finding it and they will make it more functional. As the rough edges get worked out someone, because we live in a capitalist hellscape, will add a paid hosted cloud option for people who don’t want to self-host. Adobe will fight the first few servers, but for each one they take down, new ones will pop up. Eventually Adobe will have to fold and accept the Bitwarden/Vaultwarden model: open source with paid hosting and features for convenience.
Some time after I started homelabbing, de-googling, and de-appleing I realized I needed a new password manager I found Vaultwarden so I was using that, I was happy with that but found it so frustrating that I could not use it away from my LAN not that I had moved the majority of my passwords yet but I wanted to use it away from LAN, so I found Bitwarden. I was later talking to someone and they asked “so you went from using free apps (Apple passwords, and Authy) to using paid?” I had no idea paid for options existed at the time and asked them what was not free? They listed off things I was already using it for and said no I have all those, I was so confused as to not knowing that vaultwarden gave you all the premium features of bitwarden but for free.