DNS services with blocks lists such as Pi-Hole, AdGuard, NextDNS, etc, provide a centralized config file for all devices on a network, so you only configure once, collect statistics, have built in block lists that can be easily modified and updated either automatically or manually and are fast.

Using large lists in a host file will slow local resolution. It wasn’t designed for this use case as it’s acting a flat file database with a limited amount of RAM allocated for the process and will get slower the longer the list. While this latency won’t be noticeable in the thousands of lines, once you start hitting hundreds of thousand or millions of entries it will start to crawl.

Hosts file are also unable to RegEx or Wildcard entries which means you would have to duplicated lots of variations in domains…

I mean I can also statically assign IPs to ever client and keep a spreadsheet, but why don’t I just use DHCP?

It doesn’t matter if you use a service or not. Someone in your family most likely has DNA on file, either through voluntary submission, like 23andme, or through law enforcement, military government interactions that require submission. Once a family member is on file, it’s easy to ID you. Many crimes have been solved this way. Point being, doesn’t even matter if you try to keep private, if a nation state or three letter agency wants you, you done. If you’re worried about some company having your data just don’t participate in any of them… pretty much all you can do currently.

Exactly this. All people do things that can be considered wrong. The difference between good and bad people is the good ones realize it, and change their behavior. This is what it is to be human.

Yes, Kagi has a bunch of “Lenses” not just for Lemmy & Kbin but for all kinds of sources.

As of right now I’m not sure how you could SEO boost Lemmy. The federation makes it seem like a single post exists on many different sites.

With nearly a thousand Lemmy instances it’s as though someone cross posted to hundreds of websites which there would be no way to prioritize with the way current mainstream search engines work.

They just need to program a method for indexing Lemmy, and the rest of the ActivityPub compatible services, as a single entity. I am sure they will catch up eventually.

Kagi is a search engine that has built in Lemmy/Kbin search.

If you’re talking about mainstream search engines then no, they haven’t started supporting Fediverse content yet.