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Comment by loughnane | Hacker News Reader

I treasure my attention and so I've spent some time to opt out of ads. 5 years ago I couldn't tell what DNS was, now I've got an OPNsense router at home running ZenArmor/Unbound and I can can link to it from my phone over wireguard.

Using ublock I've made a point to prune the pages I visit, so classes like "header" "breadcrumbs" "recommended" "sponsor" &c. are hidden. I self-host my media collection so I avoid spotify et al.

It all leads to a deeply pleasant digital life for me and my family; I saw fewer ads/distractions in 2023 than any year before. I know most people won't go through all the steps I did, but I'm surprised there isn't a pricey service rich folks can buy to get this sort of experience out of the box.

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My children are fascinated with the ads they occasionally see at their friends' homes. Due to their self-hosted media collection and prolific ad-blocking tech at home, they are rarely influenced by manipulative advertisers or inappropriate content suggestions. I consider it my duty as a good parent to keep up the fight.

My kids feel the same way. I feel like I've done something good that they see ads for what they are since they haven't "always been there" for them.

Kudos to you all; this is what I’m hoping to hold the line on with my kid. We rarely watched TV or really any sort of video entertainment before he came along, so we didn’t have to change our consumption habits.

It’ll be interesting to see how my kid reacts to the always-on TVs at my relatives over Christmas…

So far, he only gets to watch stuff I’ve downloaded or specifically looked up (no recommendations has really quieted things down) on an old laptop. He’s learned how to skip to the next video in VLC, but as I have it set to display a text list of titles, still has to ask me to put on a specific one. That’s fine; it keeps my temptation to park him in front of the screen and do something else in check.

Ironically for being the only American kid at his Kindergarten (German preschool), he has no idea who the American cartoon characters on his classmates’ backpacks and jackets are.

Missing some Invidious and Yattee for youtube there friend.

Adfree and crowd-sourced sponsor segment skipping is a glorious experience.

Forgot to mention, I've got an invidious instance set up too. I also make much use of yt-dlp. Also miniflux for rss, a remarkable tablet w/ rmfakecloud for my ebooks, and prob some more stuff.

On the YT side it feels good paying a few bucks a month for each channel i like and getting to skip the ads. I hope that picks up. I don't like paying for YT premium because then my identity is tied to my watch history.

or ReVanced. it's a beautiful project. Also, I've been using AdNauseum (based on Ublock) over the last few months and love it.

I'm interested in running Invidious on my NAS. The docs make it seem relatively resource-intensive. Any experience with that?

I see it as pretty light. I installed via docker and it works great. The machine has a i7-1165G7

There is a small cottage industry of privacy focused products that do some section of the heavy lifting (adguard comes to mind, and there is a paid DNS service that essentially does what pihole does with easier configuration as well) but no "one stop shop" as of yet, and I think in part its because

- the market isn't conditioned to want these services

- awareness of their benefits aren't obvious

- Its still within the realm of the technically literate to understand its purpose

Particularly that last point. I've tried setting up blocking for my friends / relatives, just a simple uBO setup in the browser - their main concern is what happens when it breaks the page or doesn't work. I've explained to them how they can disable it for that page or report a filter list issue, but they just don't seem to "get it" and usually end up uninstalling the blocker. I think to get mainstream a service would have to provide technical support on the grandma-can-barely-click-the-mouse level.

I do think though that people can understand the benefits of adblocking. For example the digital video recorders that cut ads out of broadcasts, that was/is a successful product. And my friends complain about the ads - it is just that the blockers are not at a level where they can use them.

Ad-blocking/privacy as a service has a problem in that it's only a matter of time before your data (DNS queries for example) will be logged and sold to advertisers. Enshittification is inevitable, the cloud can't be trusted, and neither can the state, so the people who want privacy focused products will naturally want to self-host instead of creating an account that can track them before handing over all their data to one or more third parties with nothing but a non-binding privacy policy promise by some for profit company not to look at or sell any of it.

Isn't DNS over HTTPS and other DNS encryption schemes suppose to protect against this type of tracking since you can't introspect anything in transit?

If it's a DNS based privacy service (such as the mentioned "DNS service that essentially does what pihole does with easier configuration") they'll need to see your DNS traffic to know when to block the traffic.

If you use services like Google or Cloudflare to provide DNS over HTTPS they've got access to your traffic and you're vulnerable to being tracked by them anyway.

I need to get back on this. I ran PiHole for years which worked really well. Something broke with my network which messed up IP provisioning and the PiHole got permanently disabled.

Is there a particular guide you followed or did you put this strategy together over time?

Check out NextDNS. It's easier than hosting your own DNS filter. It's got plenty of knobs and switches plus lots of blocklists to choose from. (The Hagezi lists are particularly good.) Also, if you run it on your devices (in addition to your router), it filters on any network you happen to join.

I put things together over time. I also started w/ PiHole before moving to OPNSense (on a box i got from protectli)

If you're looking to get into it I'd recommend that path. OPNSense works pretty nice out of the box, the documentation is great and there's a million switches for you to experiment with. There's even a tool to link your configuration to a git repo so that if anything ever breaks you can always go back.

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