For YouTube, I’ve switched to Grayjay and I just subscribe to creators I like. I ignore the home feed.

This has removed AI slop, ads, and shorts, which is awesome, but I the tradeoff is jot having a useful recommendation feed. Its not as good as YouTube of old, but worlds better than YouTube of the last few years.

Not really silent so much as waiting for the new talking points.

I ran it on a Pi Zero W for a bunch of years, and it was as stable and problem free as it gets.

Early this year I swapped out my wifi/router for a minipc running OPNsense. I retired the pihole since OPNsense has Unbound built in.