this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2022
9 points (100.0% liked)

Self Hosted - Self-hosting your services.

11410 readers
2 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules

Important

Beginning of January 1st 2024 this rule WILL be enforced. Posts that are not tagged will be warned and if not fixed within 24h then removed!

Cross-posting

If you see a rule-breaker please DM the mods!

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

A few months ago I set up a Pi-hole at home. I tried to create a decent blacklist by first adding some regexes I found online and then doing some manual optimization by finding ads and blocking the ad requester through the queries page. But in the end it did not work so well. I still get a lot of YouTube ads, for example. So I still rely on uBlock for my ad-blocking.

I just read that Chrome is planning to start weakening ad blocker plugins. I use Firefox, but it is still worrying that the space could potentially keep moving in this direction over time. So I am now more invested in learning how to have more control over my ad-blocking.

Has any of you managed to optimize your Pi-hole to the point that it is possible to browse the internet without an ad-blocker? If so, how did you do it? Are there other good ad-blocking alternatives?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have a couple of blocklists loaded into the family Pi-Hole:

  • Steven Black's master list
  • Ad-Wars
  • Ad Away
  • hostsVN
  • yoyo.org's dynamic list

That seems to have knocked out maybe 94% of the ads we'd otherwise see. I can't speak for the rest of the famiy, but I still use uBlock Origin for Firefox to handle Youtube ads.

My strategy for the medium to long term is this: Given that browser-based adblocking is more and more likely to be killed off, or at least badly nerfed, I'm pushing adblocking out to the Pi-Hole and will leave streaming service ad blocking in the browser for as long as possible. If and when that eventually goes away I already have a bot running and used somewhat heavily to download video streams to view with Kodi or VLC.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks! I will keep those lists in mind. I have turned off my Raspberry Pi since then because I had some DNS issues, but:

Given that browser-based adblocking is more and more likely to be killed off, or at least badly nerfed, I’m pushing adblocking out to the Pi-Hole and will leave streaming service ad blocking in the browser for as long as possible.

That's a good point and it appears like we are getting closer to that reality.