My Raspberry Pi SD card finally died after almost 10 years, and I was hosting Pi-Hole on it. After a year of Pi-Hole I didn't realize how many things had freaken ads. They pop up everywhere! I really need to get a new SD card :(
I don't bother with PiHole because DNS-based ad blocking quite frankly sucks and is only getting worse.
I'm still waiting for someone like AdGuard to release a MITM proxy that does something similar to uBlock Origin and strips ads directly from the network traffic
But until then, browser extensions are good enough for most usecases (Firefox user so the adblocking ones work on mobile as well)
I use NextDNS and it's good for my devices, but Google sponsored links won't work with it. Sometimes I have to turn it off temporarily to get something done.
Also, my wife works from home in social media. I can't really block ads network-wide because she needs to see them.
I've used Pihole for so long.. I bought the original pi as a curiosity but Pihole was best use of it.
Here is the problem though, which i assume applies to all adblockers: everything is now "sponsored links". Google, Amazon, etc. They are of course blocked which is getting really frustrating.
So what do we do now? Is there a way to just send fake telemetry? Saw VLANs mentioned. Is that the way? I'm getting older and life gets busier and it's harder for me to keep up on this.
I've wanted to do this for some time, but everyone tells me there's no way to make it work without constantly updating the blacklist. Is it really such a hassle?
I'm a pfBlockerNG guy myself. I believe it does just about the same thing where it prevents DNS lookups of blacklisted domains. It also does ip blocking of known bad ips, it can do this because it runs directly on my firewall. Although pfsense is freebsd and not linux.
I use Firefox with Ublock on both my PC and Phone and haven't had to deal with ads in years, PiHole just seems like a lot of hassle without much more benefit.