I definitely consume too much dystopian content to be a fair dystopian barometer, but the sheer amount of ads being pushed my way is starting to make me feel legitimately anxious. It feels like a techno-dystopia where all of the neat and artistic elements have been extracted and then ground into dust for our corporate overlords. Even the ‘regular’ people are just trying to sell themselves. The streamers, the funny videos, the pet videos, the porn, the reposts of all of those, so much of it is just monetizing my attention.

Do ads even influence people that much? Does anyone even eat Church’s Chicken?! Do people consider switching their car insurance? I though the postmoderns were jumping the gun a little with the pictures they painted of a future with corporate logos and other advertisements spread across every visible surface, but now I have to see 5 ads and a cookie consent pop up to look up a quick definition. Watching a friend’s youtube video? 30 seconds of rapidfire ads from 15 brands. It’s starting to feel absurd. Are we going to be okay?

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Librewolf will block ads for you in addition to a fair amount of other nifty stuff

I used to pay for Youtube Premium for actually quite a while; out of all the cacophony of "it's only $29.87 a month you can afford that" voices it was actually one that had a pretty significant impact on my happiness. But now I just block the ads and fuck 'em.

[–] astanix 5 points 9 months ago

It's only $2.27 if they think you live in a certain country.

2.27 feels reasonable for my family of 5.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Any other adblocker will also do. I use uBlock origin for Firefox, but there are many other adblockers just as good (or full browsers like brave)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Librewolf comes bundled with uBlock Origin, which is why it blocks ads so well. I havent seen an ad in years lol.

I’d also recommend the alternative player extension for twitch, as it’s one of the only websites that uBlock doesn’t block ads on.

[–] GrammatonCleric 1 points 9 months ago

Revanced ftw

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

We’ve been using Xbox as our main media player for a long time, I want to set up a plex server or similar but haven’t had time to do my homework on safe execution. Anything that would alleviate ads on xbox?

[–] sturlabragason 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

And I'd recommend running jellyfin instead of plex.

https://www.androidauthority.com/jellyfin-vs-plex-home-server-3360937/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Thanks for both suggestions! I’ll take a look at jellyfin again when I have time to deal with this. In the past I’d heard it was pretty hard to integrate with xbox smoothly, and I have friends with plex I was hoping to share with.

If just pointing the xbox at adguard or similar would work that would be quite elegant, but I’m not sure how I’d add vpn protection? At the router?

I need to prioritize this before I go mad. Anyway, I appreciate that you took the time to cater some responses to my use case:)

[–] tpyo 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Hey, this is a pretty good question that I think might get overlooked as it's a child comment in this post.

Try asking that question here:

https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted

I don't know if that link works properly and hopefully a bot will rescue me if it doesn't

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]

[–] sturlabragason 2 points 9 months ago

You'd probably want to look into blocking traffic on your network using pihole or if its possible to reconfigure your xbox network settings and point it at adblocking DNS servers such as AdGuard:

https://adguard-dns.io/en/public-dns.html

Xbox
Press the Xbox button on your controller to open the guide.
Select Profile &amp; system → Settings → General → Network Settings.
From the Network screen options, go to Advanced Settings → DNS Settings.
Select Manual.
Change DNS addresses to the addresses of one of the servers below.
Default servers
AdGuard DNS will block ads and trackers.
94.140.14.14
94.140.15.15
Non-filtering servers
AdGuard DNS will not block ads, trackers, or any other DNS requests.
94.140.14.140
94.140.14.141
Family protection servers
AdGuard DNS will block ads, trackers, adult content, and enable Safe Search and Safe Mode, where possible.
94.140.14.15
94.140.15.16
If your game console supports IPv6 addresses, add them as well.
Default servers
AdGuard DNS will block ads and trackers.
2a10:50c0::ad1:ff
2a10:50c0::ad2:ff
Non-filtering servers
AdGuard DNS will not block ads, trackers, or any other DNS requests.
2a10:50c0::1:ff
2a10:50c0::2:ff
Family protection servers
AdGuard DNS will block ads, trackers, adult content, and enable Safe Search and Safe Mode, where possible.
2a10:50c0::bad1:ff
2a10:50c0::bad2:ff
Press B to confirm changes and exit the menu.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Does it also keep recommendations?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

It does; you can log in to Youtube and all and still operate everything as normal. Some things don't work (Netflix and HBO Max) because of DRM, which is a little bit of a worrying development. Librewolf seems like it cuts actually a pretty good balance of scrubbing stuff, making you log into services again when you restart it, but working pretty normally 90% of the time and not showing ads. It's a much more pleasant experience (to the point that going back to Chrome and dealing with ads is real off-putting now).