I just read a blog post about using NextDNS to block Roku ads. Glad I'm using my own handmade blocklist.
IMO if you want aggressive blocklists that the average person might get frustrated by like no google then running adguard home for yourself is the way to go.
From their git closed tickets:
NSA: https://github.com/nextdns/blocklists/pull/105
Google and Facebook:
https://github.com/nextdns/blocklists/issues/235
From the git activity (diff linked in case anyone wants to copy and paste):
Google and Facebook: https://github.com/nextdns/blocklists/compare/8e36cfa267930a7dba8e27b0501e199c8a02b0b3...439d8b5a053aab0f93a7ad4341798ebfd1f17a0b
What is everyones preferred solution?
Bet your ass I will now!
Also for Android devices I find Rethink in DNS only mode with locally downloaded block lists works pretty well and is pretty private. Only issue is it takes your VPN slot, though it itself can connect to a WireGuard VPN as well, but if you need to enable and disable VPNs for various circumstances or need other types of VPNs that require nonstandard protocols or software to connect to then it becomes a pain. But this when when you leave your network DNS behind, you still have some protection and it's all done locally.
Best practice is to host 2 PiHole instances, if 1 DNS sinkhole fails you can fallback to another one (Primary & Secondary DNS Server) that way you don’t lose internet access.
Certainly read and try to interpret the documents as best as you can, I suggest going the Docker Compose route for hosting as it’s quite straight forward and a great tool to learn if you want to selfhost other software, fiddle around with 1 DNS sinkhole before you jump head first into getting the second one up though.
FYI it works on anything. I hosted it on a Raspberry Pi 1B (the very first one, it’s slow shite), and now I host it on an Orange Pi Zero. It’s not as slow, but it’s not too powerful either. Both devices are plenty for this project.
Recently, someone hosted it on a ESP32 or something. Not giving the link, simply because I don’t know which one is the genuine one. I use the project for close to a decade and it’s just works, mostly.
I use Technitium. It has tons of features that I'm not experienced enough to mess with, plus it does recursive DNS and blocking like pihole.
I shifted to ControlD long time ago and have been very satisfied. Also it is a Canada company instead of a US company.
I have recently cancelled my subscription with them. I have learnt that their setup is not HA (because their outage took my internet with it for a bit) and you can't make it HA either, you get assigned to 1 endpoint and if that's down your DNS is gone, even when they have loads of other working endpoints around you (and their suggestion to this is to add a different DNS as a fallback). Frustrating, as I did like their service for the price.
Kind of even more annoying was that while I was their customer I couldn't get through their AI support bot to a person to just raise this as a problem and get a proper response, but as soon as I cancelled an actual human reached out to ask why.
My Pihole couldn't reach all the old NextDNS blocklists I subscribe to a few days ago. Makes sense now.
Bummer! Thanks for the heads up.
We should be able to manually enter them all. We should save them while we still can.
I just fork all the repos of lists I use in github and created a repo for my personal blocklist and blacklist and have my AGH pull from those. That way they keep updated, if one of them fucks up I can always go back a version (same thing if any of them disappear). It's been working great.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)