Your mom always gives up the pihole.

I can’t recall the last time I saw ads. Years probably. Between using uBlock, more secure browsers, invidious or clients that use invidious for YT, as much open-source stuff as possible, self-hosting through Tailscale and vpn including SearXNG, etc. I want to setup a pihole but haven’t had the need to yet as my setups have served me well.

Rawdogging the internet is a great way to catch a disease.

Yeah I know it was a very iffy time luckily it was only one night and morning. I broke the protection many times today but I am all wrapped up now.

Good to hear brother, stay safe.

I run two synchonised Adguard instances on two different devices as DNS servers for the house (and for my work PC via vpn). on top of that I run local ad blockers on top of that. I dont care that my DNS ping times are a few ms longer. I dont want to be pestered, tracked, solicited or interrupted.

I cant stand the barrage of ads, especially on mobile websites, like its at the point where you want to read an article and you get two lines of text and the entire rest of the screen is ads you have to navigate.

I have 2 instances of pihole running in my LAN, I have wireguard on my firewall to get to those two ad blockers when I am away from home. I am so glad I was able to figure out how to get it back up and running without needing to redo all the work.

I have pihole do a lot more than just block ads; they also block a few different tlds (like .zip), they have different lists for different vLANs, and there are several different regex things I have in it.

They are not on the same pi, sure they are both docker images but they are on different pi’s

Those few MS of latency are worth the recursive DNS and lack of ads for me too.

It’s been the best thing in my stack for a long time now.

You ask how people handle how many adds are shoved when using their devices. I think it’s due to the slow immersion into them over the years. Early web was mostly banner ads which became flashy and distracting. It started around that time and people being people, most just never really thought different as that’s the way the WWW is.

For those of us who run adblockers or use an ad-blocking DNS, and have done so for many years, it is quite jarring to see the unfiltered ad-infested scape of the web. (Most commonly when installing an new OS and not yet setting up the DNS) Some people are happy with them as every search engine ad link they click works and they go about their merry way.

it is quite jarring to see the unfiltered ad-infested scape of the web.

It’s more than jarring. It makes me want to rage quit when I’m over at a friend’s house trying to help them work through an issue. Especially now that most people have migrated to Windows 11. So, now you have webpages of ads and popups, and the OS itself is inundating you with popups and ads. And it’s not like I haven’t spent hours with my friends trying to get them to cut that shit out.

I still run an instance of Windows 10 on a local account, but it has been severely detached from the mother ship and de-bloated. Telemetry, communications with Microsoft, etc, are handled by a very long host file. Services are to a bare minimum. Pfsense filters Microsoft crap as well. Now since updates are no longer being offered, that door has been shut too. So now, it’s just an OS without the umbilical cord to the mother ship.

I was never really a windows user, I grew up on Mac OS (Apple DOS, 7, 9, and X). I am stuck with an iPhone and an iPad because I do not have the money to replace them at the moment but as soon as there are no longer updates for them they are being stripped of most of the data, being put onto my IoT vLAN and being used as HA kiosks. I say so long to things as soon as updates are not being pushed because they become attack vectors. I have had my ID stolen once before, probably not because of out dated things but I want to limit the places bad actors can get to me (just know the process of making sure stuff doesn’t hurt you further is hell).

I have a Mac mini I am thinking of doing some actual work to get Debian installed on but I turned on the Mac just to get my iTunes purchased music off of it and than half assed an attempt to get refit installed and get Debian running, maybe some day I will get it working but that day is not now.

I spin up a new address for everything so I did not get those ads at least.

This is the way. Silo all accounts. I use Firefox relay, and another service called BurnerMail. I can literally spin up unlimited email aliases. In fact, BurnerMail will allow you to specifically name the alias for the specific account. So, you could have reddit.5742@mailbeaver.net. Which is handy for filtering and directing emails to specific folders, including the trash can in your email client.

I use easyDNS and they have a wild card option for their email, so I have a formula whenever I am signing up for something my email addresses are always nameofservice_funSaskathchewanwordplusthreerandomnumbers@reannlegge.ca. When I started this I was on hosthero and they use cpannel with no wildcard options you have to go in and create the email address before you use it. When I left hosthero, because they cost to much and are not the friendliest company to deal with I had something approaching 300 unique email addresses after 4 or 5 years because I did just not bother closing them after I continued using the free trial of whatever or just stopped the forwarding to my main email address or whatever email it needed to be sorted into.

Now I just have everything automatically go into junk mail unless it is something I need than I make the effort to log into their easyMAIL web thingy and sort where it should go. I have it set to delete things that are a week old (I think it could be a month?) so if I do not need it I do not need to worry about it and it will just go away on its own other things are sorted into folders and very few things are sent to my inbox.

nameofservice_funSaskathchewanwordplusthreerandomnumbers@reannlegge.ca.

That’s not a name, that’s a sentence.

What are these ads you speak of? 😎

Kidding aside…ya’ll go crazy with your piHoles and such and I’m over here using software that just…doesn’t serve ads. I think the most I’ve had to do is install Karma Firewall on the kids tablets and maybe change the front end on the TVs (which doesn’t connect to the net, though media stick does).

That and uBlock on browser seems to give me 90% of the results of using pihole, pfsense etc. So, I just…stopped using them.

Now, when I visit my folks…yeah…holy shit…but I wonder sometimes if some of this adblocking stuff doesn’t go overboard.

It’s a little bit like the four rules for winning a street fight.

• Avoid stupid people.
• Avoid people doing stupid things.
• Avoid stupid places.
• Avoid stupid times.

but I wonder sometimes if some of this adblocking stuff doesn’t go overboard.

How so? I haven’t seen ads on any of my devices in decades. In fact, if I can’t bend a site to my will, with my parameters, I’ll go elsewhere. 90% of the time, that info is duplicated a hundredfold across the internet.

I mean, people fetishise it. Ad blocker, third-party cookies blocked, fingerprint-resistant browser, Pi-hole, VPN… all to visit Reddit.

When the simple solution is Lemmy.

There’s usually a 80/20 solution to these things and it shouldn’t require a burner phone, cryptography and tradecraft.

I mean, people fetishise it. Ad blocker, third-party cookies blocked, fingerprint-resistant browser, Pi-hole, VPN… all to visit Reddit.

Well, if I were visiting the raw, unfiltered version of Reddit, I’d want a condom for my network. That place is nuts.

When the simple solution is Lemmy.

Reddit is a vast repository of data and info not really present in Lemmy.

As far as plugins for anti fingerprints, et al, I keep them to a minimum. My standalone pfsense firewall does a lot of the heavy lifting so all I really need on my browser is Ublock Origin.

ETA: I didn’t notice who I was replying to, lol. Good to see you again.

👋👋

The reddit analogy may have been bad. What I meant was: there’s usually a side door and it’s usually simpler. You don’t have to walk through the whole building to get to the room you want.

But actually, specifically on the topic of reddit…

redlib.catsarch.com

But actually, specifically on the topic of reddit…

I use safereddit.com a lot. It’s just the one LibRedirect is pointed to.

I got into self hosting because my place flooded and I was waiting on insurance and the repair people to fix give the go a head and then to actually fix my place I do not really go anywhere so I was fine with being blasted with ads when I was out of my home, until I caught myself watching ads to get extra whatever from a mobile game. I had a pi zero 2 (with a PoE hat) that was not being used for anything so I thought why not use it to host wireguard, I had looked at a few options for VPNs but thought wireguard fit my needs the best. It “worked” I do not know if it was just my copper internet speeds or the silicon in the pi zero 2 which slowed everything down but now that I have a dedicated OpenWRT firewall, fibre, and a static IP (well technically 2 I just do not use the second one because the weekend project of spinning up my own SMTP and IMAP server had me at the point where I wanted to pull out my hair), I have wireguard automatically turn the VPN on when I am away from my LAN. So I would only see the adds if I went on someone elses device.