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Network level ad-blocking like Privoxy and pi-hole have so many downsides like they can't handle inline adverts. My pi4 pi-hole is unplugged right now because i
by slacka 3y ago
Network level ad-blocking like Privoxy and pi-hole have so many downsides like they can't handle inline adverts. My pi4 pi-hole is unplugged right now because it just didn't work well. After hours wasted trying to make it work with all the services, I've thrown in the towel. The time involved is just not worth it for a home network.
What works are browser based ad-blockers and app patchers like ReVanced. As my savings have gone up, I've relied more and more on just paying for ad-free services like YouTube Premium, Hulu, Netfix, and Max for the cases those 2 can't handle.
- KerrAvon 3y agoWhat services are you having trouble with? My RPi PiHole has been working great for whole-house blocking for a half-decade now.
- ryaneager 3y agoLikewise. My biggest tip is set your secondary DNS to something outside your networks so if your pi-hole goes down your entire network doesn’t go down you just get ads.
- smolyeet 3y agoThere’s also nextdns which I was planning on switching to anyways
- berniedurfee 3y agoI’ve been using NextDNS for a few years now. I don’t have time to mess with an ‘on prem’ solution. It works really well and is simple to manage. It runs on my mobile devices easily. I turn it off occasionally to shop, but immediately turn it back on as the internet is a whole different place without some sort of robust ad blocking. It’s nice to see the logs fill up with blocked telemetry and other crap all day.
- sizzle 3y agoIs it okay to use cloudflare dns?
- fbdab103 3y agoAirplane booking sites seem incapable of working with a Pihole. Presumably the entire travel industry is similar
- berniedurfee 3y agoI use a chrome extension or app to switch DNS to something like 1.1.1.1 when a site I need can’t handle blocked DNS calls.
- skinner927 3y agoI think this is an unfair critique of the PiHole and I believe you’re throwing the baby out with the bath water. The PiHole blocks DNS and that’s all it’s designed to do, and it does it well. There’s a grandiose amount of telemetry, marketing, and general unsavory traffic flying through your network that didn’t originate from a browser. The PiHole is not exactly a turnkey solution and does take some adjusting to your preferences, but once you get it set up, you basically only have to touch it to do system updates.
- Salgat 3y agoThe problem is that unless you're willing to do surgery on a regular basis as you come across blocked sites, PiHole is going to cause more problems than it solves when you have your entire family using it. Even google stops working correctly because results for products on the front page start leading to blocked links. I like PiHole, but I had to stop using it because it was so aggravating for my wife.
- eertami 3y agoI used a PiHole for a while but after a corrupted SD card I said screw it and started using NextDNS. I have very few subscriptions, in fact nothing else except Spotify, but this one was worth the time saved and hasn't required any maintenance on my end.
- plopz 3y agoI run pi-hole strictly for my mobile devices, I let my desktop run through the router normally
- IggleSniggle 3y agoFair enough, but I've been super happy with the ability to do network level blocking; if you're willing to decrypt your own traffic, you can even do things like strip advertisements from getting embedded in Smart TVs and whatever else you have connected to your insecure network partition. I like it that I can hook up some random Roku and I won't get ads. Or my kid can connect his school laptop to our network and it wont get ads.
- nwellinghoff 3y agoDoes this just apply to the roku menu or are you saying you are stripping ads from the video streams themselves?
- cbsmith 3y agoInline adverts can be blocked, as long as you're decoding layer-7 (which is effectively what this ad is doing).
- yumraj 3y agoWhat kind of problems have you been running into. I use a layered approach. I’ve been using Pi-hole for 8-10 years, don’t remember, with about 1-2M in the block list. In addition, I use uBlock as well as pfsense with pfBlocker-NG for blocking countries and other features. They all work well together. Sometimes I have to bypass them, when I momentarily use the ISP’s Wi-Fi router directly. It’s been working fine.
- Friedduck 3y agoThis is what I fail to understand. It’s a cool hack but ad-free YouTube is a few dollars a month. Spend that creative time elsewhere!
- spaceisballer 3y agoIt’s $18.99 a month for an individual, I agree with your sentiment but really don’t feel like it’s that inexpensive. Then again I don’t consume large amounts of YouTube as most people seem to do.
- HWR_14 3y agoMost creative projects are not cost effective. If people enjoy the journey, that's what's important.