Suffice to say, it's time to ditch Alexa and bump Home Assistant a little higher on the priority tree of things to get set up.

Bonus points if I can "dumb-ify" my Samsung TV somehow.

@killyourfm @catsalad I'm.... not sure what one was expecting an Echo device to do other than talk to Amazon constantly?

@killyourfm
If the application can't phone home they will try it repeadetly in short rhythms. So you will see more tries compared to an unblocked environment. Still, your observation is correct and shows how annoying those apps try to get your data.

@killyourfm

Congratulations on getting #PiHole set up. As you say, it's a real eye-opener. I've kitted mine out with a selection of lists from the Blocklist Project:

https://github.com/blocklistproject/Lists

I've also installed #Blokada on my phone. It protects me from some of the background chatter of nosy apps, especially when I'm away from home and don't get the benefit of the Pi-Hole.

@killyourfm the worst part is pi-hole may not even be enough to see all of it, depending on what devices you have. I've personally had at least two devices that hard coded Google DNS as their DNS server and only used the one obtained from DHCP if Google DNS was unreachable. The only reason I found out was that I had blocked outgoing packets to Google DNS in the firewall.

@killyourfm Hey! I too set up a pi-hole recently. Also seeing the netflix shenanigans and it's mind bending, 10K requests blocked and the next highest was around 200.

But more importantly wanted to share some advice someone gave me - when you get a moment to find an alternative storage media for the OS, since the SD card can get fried relatively quickly with all the R/W operations.

@killyourfm Coincidentally I wrote a blog post about AdGuard Home (Pi-hole alternative) yesterday: https://blog.eischmann.cz/2026/01/04/adguard-home-domaci-ochrana-nejen-pred-reklamou/ (in Czech, but GT works well on it)
I've also noticed how much the Netflix apps call home. Glad it's blocked now.

I have this on my to-do list..
Got the pi and all that, just have to get things installed.

I have 2 kids in the house, and one of them needs some stricter filtering, and this seems like a great way to set that up.

@killyourfm Good for you. I have used Pihole from time to time over the years. I have set it up around 5 seperate times. I usually throw it on a raspberrypi but sometimes I put it on a VM on my server. The basic setup is not too bad, I almsot always setup it as a recurssive DNS resolver and that takes a minute.

@killyourfm How hard was it to set up? I'd like to do the same eventually.

@killyourfm It is crazy how much they are tracking with these things.

I am running pi-hole for a couple of months now and am still baffled by the numbers.

In the last 30 days 50% of all requests (100k) are being blocked by pi-hole. 60% of the blocked requests are coming from one Smart-TV.

At the moment the TV and HDMI works but it is not able to load the ads and tracking ridden main menu.

In comparison my main desktop with linux, vivaldi and ublock origin had 89 requests blocked.

Also, I immediately switched to the included L-CARS interface, because of course I did.

@killyourfm nice! I have a gebeal purpose blocklist here that I have been using on some networks for years now: "SNAFU" https://github.com/RooneyMcNibNug/pihole-stuff

@killyourfm The gossipy neighbor who doesn't have to peek in your window, already being in the living room.

@killyourfm yeah, I was horrified with the requests. I've since started investing in Home Assistant and just block stuff I don't want - to the annoyance of my partner who needs to be set up on an "allow all" rule in PiHole 🫣

@killyourfm now you'll be like me...load up a list with 1mill blocked things.

@killyourfm I have an LG TV, and NEVER EVER opened the Netflix app AT ALL.
It still tried to talk to Netflix ALL THE FUCKING TIME.

Nicely, LG allowed me to uninstall the NetFlix application. It's quiet now.

@killyourfm how hard was it for you as a first time user to set up / understand what was going on in your network? i want to do something similar and possibly block most of the unnecessary calls