It’s the provincial governments authentication service for Canadians, if you ever used GCKey it’s essentially the same thing but provincial opposed to federal.

It allows ease of access to things like medical records, tax records, license renewals and such.

Alberta has their own system similar to this.

the only Google service I knowingly use is Youtube

Might I suggest Invidious as an alternative, you can host your own that way only 1 device on your network needs to contact YouTube directly or you can use one that is public.

[–] Reannlegge@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Might I suggest Invidious as an alternative, you can host your own that way only 1 device on your network needs to contact YouTube directly or you can use one that is public.

I sadly am on a iPad and iPhone, but I do use the app Unwatched that blocks youtube ads. I have tried setting up invidous but I some how always seem to mess it up The Google knows what I have watched on Youtube and that is it. I use pihole to block a lot of the tracking and I have my own email setup so that every time I need to hand out an email it is a new one. I was with hosthero but they have no wild card emails and I could not add A records, or it was very hard don’t remember or care, I am now with easyDNS and wish I started with them as they have everything I was looking for without CPannel!

[–] ohshit604@lemmy.halstead.host 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

I sadly am on a iPad and iPhone, but I do use the app Unwatched that blocks youtube ads.

I have an iPhone / iPad combo as well, my preference is Yattee as it supports the Invidious APi as well as Sponsor Block and DeArrow.

Edit; after I made this comment I checked the App Store for Yattee, it appears delisted, their GitHub reports a V2 is in the makes.

I have tried setting up invidous but I some how always seem to mess it up The Google knows what I have watched on Youtube and that is it.

That is fair, I had no issue dumping my prior watch history and starting from scratch, i can see how it turns many people away.

Invidious is quite high-maintenance unfortunately, always have to stay on top of updates which occur a couple times a week otherwise your instance falls behind and eventually dies due to YouTube constant changing of their APi.

I was with hosthero but they have no wild card emails and I could not add A records, or it was very hard don’t remember or care, I am now with easyDNS and wish I started with them as they have everything I was looking for without CPannel!

I personally bought my hardware, asus router and dedicated mini-pc for networking and server tinkering, besides electrical I only have to pay for my domain which I got from namecheap but then eventually transferred to Cloudflare, but thinking I should switch registrars after my next bill payment.

[–] Reannlegge@lemmy.ca 1 points 59 minutes ago* (last edited 43 minutes ago)

I personally bought my hardware, asus router and dedicated mini-pc for networking and server tinkering, besides electrical I only have to pay for my domain which I got from namecheap but then eventually transferred to Cloudflare, but thinking I should switch registrars after my next bill payment.

When I really got into self hosting, I was just going to get my domain name and host everything myself. The capitalist pigs at hosthero decided to get rid of the wild card option for email so I had idiotically got the unlimited email package, when I left I had close to 300 different email addresses. You know free trials don’t last forever, unless you make them last until you get board of whatever or find a FOSS alternative! I thought well setting up my own email server cannot be that hard, I was sadly mistaken and this girl likes her hair and would have pulled it all out trying to get the email working. I self host my blog, so there is that, I have wireguard running on my Flint 2 with vanilla’ish (I have made changes to it) install of OpenWRT. When I was all set to run my own email server I got two static IPs, now one of them is just sitting there with the MX records for my testing domain name.

I have two domains one that I actually use, and one that I have for testing new things, like maybe I will come across a caddy alternative that I will want to try.

Edit: I was thinking we were talking in c/selfhost I have a thing against Cloudflare so I would never use them. Something happened to me when I was using their DNS when I was much younger do not remember what it was but I just do not like them. EasyDNS offers just the domain, you do not need to get anything special. I had moved my personal domain to a .ca when the boycott the US stuff started. Hosthero seemed like a good deal for me at the time, I was only dipping my toes into selfhosting (pihole) now that I am about knee deep in the hobby of self hosting I have a lot more than a single pi running pihole. I am personally using ghost to publish things onto my personal blog and than that host has a script to post it to mastodon, I want to try and get the excitement of the book of faces back but it is just not there yet.