A few months ago I set up a Pi-hole at home. I tried to create a decent blacklist by first adding some regexes I found online and then doing some manual optimization by finding ads and blocking the ad requester through the queries page. But in the end it did not work so well. I still get a lot of YouTube ads, for example. So I still rely on uBlock for my ad-blocking.
I just read that Chrome is planning to start weakening ad blocker plugins. I use Firefox, but it is still worrying that the space could potentially keep moving in this direction over time. So I am now more invested in learning how to have more control over my ad-blocking.
Has any of you managed to optimize your Pi-hole to the point that it is possible to browse the internet without an ad-blocker? If so, how did you do it? Are there other good ad-blocking alternatives?
I have a couple of blocklists loaded into the family Pi-Hole:
That seems to have knocked out maybe 94% of the ads we’d otherwise see. I can’t speak for the rest of the famiy, but I still use uBlock Origin for Firefox to handle Youtube ads.
My strategy for the medium to long term is this: Given that browser-based adblocking is more and more likely to be killed off, or at least badly nerfed, I’m pushing adblocking out to the Pi-Hole and will leave streaming service ad blocking in the browser for as long as possible. If and when that eventually goes away I already have a bot running and used somewhat heavily to download video streams to view with Kodi or VLC.
Thanks! I will keep those lists in mind. I have turned off my Raspberry Pi since then because I had some DNS issues, but:
That’s a good point and it appears like we are getting closer to that reality.