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Comment by slacka | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I 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.

The 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.

I 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.

Why not AdGuard DNS? It's free.

How heartwarming that they run such a wonderful service purely out of the goodness of their hearts, with no income from it, and no expectation of financial compensation.

It forms the backbone of their paid AdGuard apps on iOS, MacOS and Android. Those apps create a loopback VPN on your system so they can reroute the DNS requests to AdGuard DNS.

I have our PiHole set up with just ad lists, not trackers or privacy. I follow that up on my own devices with uBO with more thorough lists, but this way my whole family gets ad protection rather than nothing.

> google stops working correctly because results for products on the front page start leading to blocked links.

Because they're often ads made to look like search results. Pi-hole working as intended.

That's my experience anyway. My family network is behind a pi-hole and rarely if ever does an intended website visit break as a result.

This is not my experience. Pihole works flawlessly for me and it’s sitting in my closet connected to my cable modem. Haven’t touched it in a year. No broken mainstream sites and I’m blocking telemetry and other crap from apple, Amazon, google, Netflix, Hulu, Wyze, etc. related to advertising and device analytics trying to profile my usage. Pi-hole has been a blessing in the war on privacy and targeted advertising.

I’m a novice, and figured it out and have zero maintenance. Unless you count occasionally updating pihole every now and then. I have a word file with all my exceptions (mostly white lists for Microsoft gaming stuff my kids want) in the event I ever need to reload (ever since I switched to a better SD never have had corruption issues). I understand the spouse issue, mine loves clicking ads on her phone. Easiest workaround is to pop off WiFi click link then go back to WiFi.

What services are you having trouble with? My RPi PiHole has been working great for whole-house blocking for a half-decade now.

Likewise. 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.

There’s also nextdns which I was planning on switching to anyways

I’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.

Is it okay to use cloudflare dns?

Airplane booking sites seem incapable of working with a Pihole. Presumably the entire travel industry is similar

I 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.

Fair 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.

Does this just apply to the roku menu or are you saying you are stripping ads from the video streams themselves?

What 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.

This 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!

It’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.

Most creative projects are not cost effective. If people enjoy the journey, that's what's important.

Inline adverts can be blocked, as long as you're decoding layer-7 (which is effectively what this ad is doing).

I run pi-hole strictly for my mobile devices, I let my desktop run through the router normally

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