Good luck. I literally went through something similar a few weeks ago. It took a little time but my entire network runs better now. You got this!

You can avoid that by using the same Wi-Fi network name and password that your current network uses. Your devices won’t know the difference.

I just want to reiterate what others have said: do some googling about your router make and model. Look for the instructions for “hard reset” or “factory reset”. Follow those instructions. Once you do, you should be able to find the default login online.

Once you’re able to log into your router, I’d suggest keeping it as your DHCP server and simply following the instructions to set up a pihole with it. Everything seems to work more smoothly without the pihole as DHCP server.

Do you know if your router is acting as a DHCP server? Most do, and if you’ve set up the Pi as one without logging in and turning off your router’s, you’ve set up two conflicting DHCP servers, and that would explain your issues.

I’ve been on the Fediverse for years and I’ve never much encountered this. I curate my timelines very carefully. I don’t look at the Local or Federated timelines in Mastodon, Pixelfed, or Lemmy.

That said, I do the exact same thing with all social media. I don’t go to the subreddits that would have such content, don’t follow users on Twitter who spew this content, etc.

I’m not disputing that it’s there, because of course it is. But it’s also there on every other social media platform, and with far more resources these platforms haven’t been able to do nearly anything about it.

I don’t know what the answer is to this propaganda, and I want to make clear that I think it’s awful. But it’s the fault of social media writ large, not the Fediverse.

In fact, I’ve found the Fediverse to be better about calling it out and encouraging defederating offending instances than I’ve seen on traditional social media, which seems to shrug its shoulders at it at best and actively encourages it at worst.

Not a bad idea! I think of works like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilliogy, which has a pretty significant focus in the second book about what a new style of collaborative governance might look like. Narrative is always the most powerful way to convince people of ideas, so I say go for it!

I have a Pi4 that is running Homebridge and pihole.