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Comment by bhauer | Hacker News Reader

Looks like this is already covered by the "Social" add-on to StevenBlack's hosts:

https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/blob/master/extensions/...

Steven Black's list is better. More complete and also has hosts for other social outlets, ad networks and trackers to block.

https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/

Is there a way to redirect to a local HTML file for any blacklisted host file addresses? Something like "You tried to access a site that's blocked in hosts file"? I tend to add blacklists like this then few months later wonder why some site doesn't work.

Yes. As the hosts file redirects to localhosts, you can run a local server, displaying a notification. As root:

    while true; do printf "blocked by hosts file" |nc -q 1 -l -p 80; done

That won't help if the site fails due to a backend request to FB falling over.

You can run a server at 127.0.0.1:80, but it won’t work for HTTPS sites… unless you also configure your own certificates on the server.

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