My retired parents live with me. I went ahead and put a PiHole on our home wifi. A day later my mother was literally complaining that she couldn’t click on ads on facebook. I told her those are ads and they track her and she says “well everyone likes to use the internet how they like to use it.. can you put it back the old way? I want to look at these shoes”. Can’t fucking win.

[–] gohixo9650@discuss.tchncs.de 19 points 11 months ago (3 children)

but this means that she would see the ads but not being able to click? I don't get it. They should had just disappeared, no? Or was she complaining that she wasn't seeing the ads?

[–] elliot_crane@lemmy.world 16 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The ads still appear in the facebook feed but clicking them results in a “this site could not be found” or similar error, is how I understood it to work. I know the PiHole basically makes it so the routes from “whateveradwebsite.com” end up not resolving to an IP address. I’m not sure how FB is serving them; so the text/image content might be coming from an FB server and the link is just an ad URL with a bunch of tracking info on it.

[–] gohixo9650@discuss.tchncs.de 13 points 11 months ago

yeah you're right actually. I always use it combined with a local browser adblock and didn't think of that

[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 9 points 11 months ago

PiHole just blocks the DNS. Facebook serves ads from their own DNS so it's not possible to block them in that way. Same with YouTube, I believe.

But if they click it, it usually ports you through a tracker link so they can track your clicks, and that's easy enough to block.

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