Huh, I’ll definitely look into that. Both times I tried to route external pihole access, somehow other mystery services found it and it slowed to a crawl from getting absolutely pounded by requests not from me. Thanks for that tip!

Except that, as I’ve already mentioned, I have two piholes, and sometimes both will be receiving requests. Based on your description, the second would never receive requests as long as the first is online. Perhaps this is router dependent, but it’s what I’ve observed.

Pretty much. Not sure how the router determines which DNS to use, but mine seems to latch onto whichever one serves up results the fastest, which would inevitably be cloudflare direct after the pihole returns enough blocks.

So I use a Raspberry Pi Zero W as a dedicated pihole, and my Pi 4 seedbox acts as its own pihole and as a redundant backup. Then use gravity-sync from the Zero to the 4 to mirror the settings.

I have two piholes, and sometimes both will receive requests at the same time, if there’s a lot of traffic.

I would avoid it, as it may use the alternate instead of the pihole at anytime. If you want redundancy, it’s best to have a second pihole.

On iOS, Tusker (for Mastodon and Pixelfed) has settings to set the default for composing and replying:

edit: also note that you can set your pixelfed account to private in general, but I think you have to check that box from the website interface. None of the apps I have include that setting.

Those proxies aren’t encrypted in any way, even if it’s one with user/pass authentication access. They’ll obfuscate your IP from other users, such as torrenters, but there’s a risk your ISP will still see unencrypted headers between you and the proxy.