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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2024

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  • Not entirely sure about the de-google’d version of the Home Assistant companion app, but I know the regular companion app uses Firebase (and whatever the Apple equivalent is called, I forget) to deliver notifications, and it still would using Telegram as Telegram also uses Firebase. Apprise is a bit different as it can use multiple backends. Regardless, there are multiple ways to do things. Ntfy iphone and google app do not route your data through a third party server. I self host the ntfy server on my own machine and domain and my phone connects to it and receives data. It will deliver notifications wherever I am, not just in my LAN. It also provides a nice UI akin to Pushbullet I can use to send myself stuff privately.

    You can’t replicate all of what ntfy does with Home Assistant. There’s more to it than just delivering notifications, it’s the whole app frontend and persistent data etc. If it’s not clear to you what it’s for from my description you might have to go look into it yourself. Look at PushBullet, that’s most similar to what I primarily use it for.


  • Home Assistant notifications and almost all other notification services on phones actually route notifications through a cloud service like Firebase because Apple and Google try to railroad apps into their platforms. Ntfy lets you actually self host notifications without a third party, but also without killing your battery.

    That’s not the main thing I care about, though. Mainly I use it as a self hosted replacement for PushBullet, to share links and files with myself across machines and do some light alerting for servers and stuff (e.g. TrueNAS errors). Some of that could he done with HA, but ntfy is just better for some other uses with stuff like its web ui.

    Plus, apart from that ntfy is really easy to integrate with other stuff, like its easy to send a notification from a shell script or web hook so you can hack it into things that don’t otherwise support notifications (there are also lots of things that support ntfy natively, e.g. the arrs).





  • Impossible to say, could be the app is doing something funky, could be iOS, could be lotta things.

    I will note, my preferred solution is to do none of the above, and I only do split DNS for one particular service. I much prefer just using an always on Wireguard VPN that is set to only route traffic to my internal subnets and to use my internal DNS server. Then I just use internal names. Wireguard basically runs at line rate on my setup, so half the time I don’t even turn it off at home. This also gives you the option to use DNS ad blocking (eg adguard) on the go.





  • The message you’re reading applies to the checkbox above for encryption, not the preferences url. The preferences key only needs to be set if you want to encrypt the configuration URL, it doesn’t affect what OP wants to do.

    My memory is a bit fuzzy because I switched to Searxng after playing with Whoogle briefly, but I thought Whoogle stored preferences in a cookie or something similar; the preferences URL is for when you want to transfer the preferences for your current machine to another. So OP is misunderstanding what it’s for.

    OP: if your preferences aren’t sticking, are you maybe blocking cookies entirely or something? I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t need to do anything with the preferences URL for your preferences to stick if everything is set up correctly, it’s only for transferring your preferences to another machine.



  • It’s not useless, it removes a lot of the tracking cookies and such and sponsored links loaded with telemetry. Theoretically you can also get the benefits of anonymity if you proxy through Tor or a VPN, which I originally tried to do but turns out Google at least blocks requests from Tor and at least the VPN endpoint I have and probably most of them. Google or whatever upstream SE can still track you by IP when you self host, but its tracking is going to much less without the extra telemetry cookies and tracking code it gets when you use Google results directly.

    But yes, practically you either have to trust the instance you’re using to some extent or give up some of the anonymity. I opted to self host and would recommend the same over using a public instance if you can, personally. And if privacy is your biggest concern, only use upstream search providers that are (or rather, claim to be) more privacy respecting like DDG or Qwant. My main use case is primarily as a better frontend to search without junk sponsored results and privacy is more of a secondary benefit.

    FWIW, they have a pretty detailed discussion on why they recommend self-hosting here.