I’ve been aware of pi-hole for a while now, but never bothered with it because I do most web browsing on a laptop where browser extensions like uBlock origin are good enough. However, with multiple streaming services starting to insert adds into my paid subscriptions, I’m looking to upgrade to a network blocker that will also cover the apps on my smart TV.
I run most of my self hosted services on a proxmox server, so I’d like something that’ll run as an LXC container or a VM. I’m also vaguely aware that various competing applications have come out since pi-hole first gained popularity. Is pi-hole still the best thing going, or are there better options?
I set up pihole a few months ago. I added a few dozen of the highest recommended block lists, but I wasn’t impressed at all. It didn’t seem very effective at blocking ads in both real world tests and tests that I found online specifically for testing your adblocker.
The best test I have is my wife complaining, that ads in Google results cannot be opened. It seems to work flawlessly for me 😂
On a more serious note, what tests are these? The thing is, the ad domain is either in the blocklist or not. Ads inside apps are hard to block (I even have adaway on my android, and some slip through as eg Instagram reuses the backend domains/endpoints for ad delivery).
This is one of the ones I used
I have a pihole setup and did not get any ads when testing there. I think you might want to add more lists to your pihole.
What lists do you have? They pretty much all came up for me. I tried it again with ublock origin to compare, but none showed up with ublock origin.
https://firebog.net/
Thank you! I’ll give this another try this weekend!
I got the wife complaining about the google results being blocked, but very little else. Most sites are still Frankenstein’s monsters full of atrocious ads.