Pihole is great for blocking on things that you can't install a local adblocker on. It does have downsides though, it can be annoying and block things you don't want it to. It might not block ads well on your tv or might impair the functionality in weird ways. It can depend lot on which lists you add, but there are many available and they are usually quite well documented about their intentions.
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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Pinhole is still a thing. If you want other options there is also adguard.
Yeah do it there is basically no downside. I agree with others that you may have trouble with the ads in streaming services. On my android TV, YouTube ads, for instance, aren't blocked by pihole.
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NextDNS is awesome if you want the simple solution, and don't have any hardware to install services on. Thee free version is somehwta limited to queries(300k per month), but personally didn't hit those when I was using the free tier.
NextDNS has a lot of nice customization and can easily had custom block lists. The pro version is 2euros a month I believe. I personally stick with NextDNS due to never having to worry about updating the service and it always just works. I also have it hooked to my Tailnet, that way all my devices use it by default.
But ofc, Pihole, Adguard and the rest are also awesome. Best to just pick one that looks good for you. The end goal here is to just have something running in the background rather than nothing.
I actually had a lot of fun a couple years ago deploying PiHole on one of my RaspberryPi’s and routing all my household machines through it. It worked great UNTIL.. my kid was turning in empty homework on Google Classroom and his teachers were getting up him about it. We chastised him thinking it was his fault until I finally discovered that Pihole was messing up his uploads to GC and literally causing this problem. I got super angry with it and walked away without even trying to troubleshoot. Had to profusely apologise not only to his teachers but to him.
I felt the same way about youtube, streaming, shopping and general browsing: too many ads. Ruins the content. I set up a pi-hole as an experiment to see if it would do what it said and what others said about it. Manage your expectations here. Pi-hole works well for blocking a lot of static information and ads in your browser and a lot of apps on iOS and Android. It does not block video ads on Youtube or Hulu, it does not block ads for Roku or Firestick or Smart TV apps for example, it just does not work because of the technical limitations of how the PiHole software is designed. Using a regular PC with adblock browser extension installed as well gets rid of 99% of ads including video ads from adcdns. PiHole is incredibly easy to setup and install, the pay off in quality of life is enormous. I cannot recommend it more to someone that has a little networking knowledge base. If you can figure out how to port forward and run a handful of command lines you can complete a pihole setup in an hour.
I use Blocky. I switched from PiHole because I didn’t have need for all the features (DHCP, Dashboard) and honestly it was a slow day and I had nothing better to do.
If someone really wants this service but do not want to (or cannot) host it themself, https://ovpn.com offer this in their client. I used to have a pi-hole selfhosted but not anymore. Using their client on my phone as well solved the problem with blocking ads while not at home.
Pi-hole and AdGuard home are both good. It kind of comes down to which UI you like better.
I have no experience outside of blocky, but the configuration file is so damm simple and clean I have troubles even considering anything else.