I also started on pihole, but switched to Blocky because Blocky is way more DevOps friendly (I run this stuff on microk8s on a Pi cluster).
Then I just ditched it altogether and now use NextDNS. Well worth paying the small fee for. But you obviously don't get the same DIY satisfaction out of it.
I'm still trying to figure it out. I joined feddit.uk just because I'm in the UK. Then I realised most of the communities were about politics and football teams. I read about Beehaw and like the sound of that so joined up there. Then realised that they had defederated from lemmy.world (which I understand and am not complaining about). So I created an account on lemmy.world as well.
I guess the thing to figure out is to find the communities you are interested in, subscribe to them and make sure your instance is federated with whatever instance those communities are part of. Then it doesn't really matter which one you join? If you just want to scroll mindlessly through posts from all of Lemmy, I guess you can just find an instance that is federated with everything and set your filter to 'All' and go nuts.
Boost is being developed for Lemmy. See dev comment at the bottom of this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/BoostForReddit/comments/14m7ow1/boost_will_stop_working_after_july_1st_thank_you/
My main issue with PiHole was that the container wouldn't work on later versions of Ubuntu for some reason (if I remember correctly, anything later than 18.04). I never did figure it out. The other reason was since I was running it in Kubernetes, the whole point is to have multiple replicas running for redundancy, but PiHole's UI is coupled with its backend DNS service so if you have 3 PiHole instances running, you had 3 GUI instances as well. You could load balance the DNS requests (I used MetalLB), but visiting the UI was pointless. Also, the config was very scripty and not really container friendly - I mean it worked but it wasn't designed as a cloud native application. No fault of its own but it didn't really suit the way I like to do things.
Enter Blocky, which doesn't have a UI and has a very simple YAML config that is easily mounted to a container. It scaled much easier, used way less resources and was just simpler to manage. It was really exactly what I was looking for.
However, ultimately running the DNS service for my house out of a Pi cluster wasn't really my best idea. It has to work 100% of the time, and I would have frequent outages. We are a family of 5, so imagine lots of 'Dad! The TV's not working!!' and stuff like that every time. This thing was a pet project, and I didn't have it set up as a 'production' service, which is what it really should be. Sometimes the metallb pods would fall over, or the kubernetes TLS certificates would expire for the cluster, etc. I didn't have proper monitoring and alerting setup, etc. I just couldn't be bothered putting the effort into it that it required.
NextDNS does exactly the same thing, with probably even better controls, is more reliable, has great logging and costs bugger all.
EDIT: meant to add, I used it for more than just adblocking, but also for parental controls. NextDNS is great for that as well.