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Comment by Brajeshwar | Hacker News Reader

NextDNS is nice and easy to use for us, a family -- non-technical spouse, two kids with access to devices for schools, 'games & stuff'. I ran Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi 3 for about a year and it is one of the best ever there. I wanted something simple and something I can just clicky-click.

Been testing NextDNS for quite a while and I like it. Will continue as long as it serves what I'm looking for.

On a different note, unlike most of us, my wife and kids are worried that they can no longer see those 'interesting and useful' ads. They go on to those ads, spend long minutes browsing from one to the other, propelled by ads. My kids discovers 'these amazing games' via the ads. It is a different world out there.

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I'll make sure to raise my kids on adblockers so they can never develop that habit.

That's why I switched to Adguard Home: https://adguard.com/en/adguard-home/overview.html You can make custom configurations per device, OS or a different label you give them. So you can have your wife see their ads while still blocking your smart TV from calling home.

How does it differ from the NextDNS configuration profiles?

You run it yourself on your own hardware - a PC, Raspberry Pi, Linux server, Docker container - you choose. It is open source; logging remains with yourself. It only works inside your own network unless you VPN into your home network when you are remote.

Difference from pi-hole? Genuinely curious since I'm currently using pi-hole at home.

PiHole 5 introduced the same features but there used to be a difference in the past.

It's way faster in terms of UI atleast. It boots up almost instantly, configuration is pretty simple and the UI is better IMO.

What boots up almost instantly? It's supported on quite a few OSes [0], not to mention the underlying hardware. I found AdGuard's (Home) UI to be a bit more polished but it feels like it has feature parity with PiHole 5 otherwise. I tried both but stuck with PiHole since the community around it seemed more developed.

[0] https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/wiki/Getting-Star...

NextDNS is advertised as Cloudflare + Pi-Hole. And I think this is correct.

Something wrong with the Pi-Hole, I have to sit down (likely at home), and do it -- even to add/edit something. NextDNS is much simpler, I can set up from anywhere and I can even ask my wife to fix herself stuffs.

Must be just personal but these days, I'm not too keen on doing everything myself the way I want. I'm learning to say NO to a lot of things.

Not NextDNS, my question/comment was regarding the parent comment's mention of Adguard.

> It is a different world out there.

I've noticed the same thing! Wife and kids actually do tap on (some) ads and discover new games, merchandise, etc. that way. They are also easily tricked into reading or watching stuff by this or that 'influencer', which is mostly just advertising under disguise. Maybe tricked is too strong of a word here, because they seem to enjoy it ... it just seems to be part of the way they interact with online world.

As long as people are aware that their habits are being tracked and such it's a choice everyone can make for themselves.

(especially kids) not being aware of 1) clicks/behavior being tracked and 2) perhaps being manipulated by exploiting this knowledge about their behavior sounds bad to me...

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