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Comment by alex_young | Hacker News Reader

Ad free internet costs ~$40 one time fee. Raspberry Pi + pihole dns.

I also run this, and it's pretty worth it, but 40$ discounts the time, and makes it sound like the perfect solution. While it is good, it isn't perfect.

2$/month for NextDNS for dns adblocking as a service. Works outside of your home, too.

uBlock Origin is free.

True but this only blocks ads in the browser.

Both have their uses.

PiHole protects your entire LAN (home, office, whatever).

uBlock protects your browser / device wherever it goes.

Defence in depth Is in fact A Thing.

I tried Pihole a couple of years ago, and while it did block every god forsaken ad, I had a lot of trouble with sites not working right, and the process of turning off the Pihole for that was annoying. Has anything changed since then?

IDK, I find the web interface pretty easy to use - you can whitelist stuff you need to use over and over again, and disable the whole thing if you encounter something one off with a single click.

Genuinely curious what you do when a site asks you to turn off your adblocker? PiHole doesn't have an option to whitelist an individual site like an extension does. Do you just leave the site or do you temporarily turn off PiHole?

A lot of folks just temporarily disable their pi-hole. This happens rarely depending on where you hang out on the internet, I can't remember the last time it happened to me

Different options. Turn off pihole for that site. Or using something like archive.is or wayback machine. Sometimes just blocking the banner with ublock works too. Other times there are link previews like telegram quick view

You can whitelist domains.

What I do is toggle reader mode for that site if on mobile. That always bypasses it. I can also select the overlay on uBlock origin. If that doesn’t work I’ll disable JavaScript for the site since these popular need JavaScript. If all that fails I’ll simply not use the site.

Disable JavaScript and refresh the page.

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