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What adblocking DNS do you recommend and why? Or do you not recommend one?
(self.softwareoptions)
I use nextdns and adguard dns. Both have served me well.
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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I personally use Adguard home on my home network but I also have nextdns on my personal devices. I haven't had issues with either of them. Both have pretty similar interfaces, Nextdns was easy to set up and I self host adguard home so it's a tad more complicated. I have to say nextdns offers a lot more blocklists though, ended up only using a few of the blocklists I'm familiar with because I ended up blocking google and facebook stuff that broke some websites. But that's more of my fault for not reading which blocklists I turned on than a nextdns problem. Though, it would help if they were to put warnings on potential blocklists that tend to break websites.
Also self-hosting AdGuard, I like it since I can add any sites to my whitelist/blacklists.
At home, on top of AdGuard, I still use Ublock Origin, Ghostery, NoScript, Decentraleyes, and Privacy Badger, a VPN and a privacy focused browser like Firefox or Vivaldi (even though all this much would actually makes a unique fingerprint of my browser...)
I will admit that NoScript is a pain having to manually approve JavaScript on websites before they will work properly, but its also eye opening.
For mobile, anything I'm not running through my home WiFi I use AdGuard's public DNS in addition to a VPN.
I used to have noscript but simply too many sites I use JavaScript so I don't have it anymore.
Techlore came out with a video guide recently on nextdns. And which features to use.
The summary is... not to use too many blocklists. Use the consolidated ones and frequently updated.
I’m running PiHole at work for the entire network. Desktops point at Windows DCs for initial resolution and those point at my PiHole for external resolution. It works well. PiHole isn’t perfect and the database needs some monitoring and occasional cleanup.
I should add the PiHole runs on Debian in my vmWare environment.
~~ControlD It's a paid service and not as good from a privacy standpoint as something self-hosted, but it's effective, easy to set up, reasonably priced ($20/year), and I can use it anywhere.~~
NextDNS appears to have all the same features BUT it has a full featured free tier with monthly request limit high enough the average person probably won't hit it, and it's probably better from a privacy standpoint.
There's a web dashboard you use to set it up so no apps to install. There's a bunch of preset blocklists you can pick from and customize. You can also set different white/black lists for different devices.
I've only had a few sites break, and when they do I can just open the dashboard and whitelist them. There's a feature that temporarily shows you all the attempted requests so if something is breaking you can figure out which domain to whitelist.
What does paying for ControlD add over a free option like NextDNS?
I wasn't aware of that. I took a quick look and as far as I can tell the feature set is the same. They're also endorsed by Mozilla which at least for me proves they're very legit. I've edited my comment to recommend that instead.
My usage is a little higher than the query limit for the free tier but I will probably switch to their paid tier once my current subscription period is up.
Thanks for the recommendation.
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