Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

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70% of HN readers probably don't have the technical knowledge (or hardware on hand) to set up pi-hole without investing 10+ hours.

For those of us with a raspberry pi or intel nuc on hand, sure, it only takes 30 minutes.

This service is for people who want to kill ads at the DNS level without dealing with the hardware / setup of pihole.

Also, not many people are going to bother setting up a VPN to access their pihole DNS when traveling or on cellular, which makes NextDNS attractive.

The other argument is "just use ublock matrix". The counter-argument is it doesn't block native app ads / tracking. (One of the #1 blocked domains on my pihole is from Dashlane's MacOS app, constantly wanting to phone home)

> 70% of HN readers probably don't have the technical knowledge (or hardware on hand) to set up pi-hole without investing 10+ hours.

That seems pretty dismissive of our audience. I cant think of many things easier to set up than pi-hole, unless even using SSH is too difficult to understand.

1) Buy a rasp-pi (or pretty much any other device support a reasonably standard Linux distribution)

2) Copy one of many Linux distributions to an SD card with something like etcher: a couple clicks. Or buy one of the many pre-made kits with Linux already on the card.

3) Run a single line linux command via SSH and follow prompts.

4) change DNS settings in router to use the pi-hole.

Although I agree, it's not terribly complex to follow the steps. Lack of time to fiddle with self-managing a device seems like it could be a bigger limiter.

Sure, but presumably the type of people who are willing to run their own DNS resolver are capable of changing a setting on their router. There's substantially more effort in de-breaking sites broken by pi-hole or other ad-blocking software than there is in maintaining the blocking device.

70% of many audiences, even of tech news sites? Sure. But of Hacker News' audience? I would expect many here could follow the basic setup tutorial relatively easily.

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