So last night my firewall decided to say F you Reann and stopped working for no apparent reason. I called my ISP to see if it was anything on their end but it was a big nope. It was rather late at night and I do not have computers with monitors at my place so I thought I was SOL. I was frustrated that I could not do anything because I had the bright idea of deleting one of my two static IPs out of the router and than reboot it. I thought to calm my frustrations I would play some games on my ipad, and holly poop am I ever not used to all the ads in mobile games. Luckily my youtube ad blocking does not require anything else on my LAN so I put on some videos and went to bed. In the morning I remembered I had a ethernet to USB adapter and a USB A to c adapter so I would be able to fix it that way. Don’t know how many times I needed to fix the firewall because I broke the internet trying to fix my boo boos and a few times the firewall just said F you Reann I am not putting out. But it is now fixed and I can enjoy my moble games and web browsing mostly ad free!
So I had no pihole action on my LAN.
Like seriously how do people hand how many ads are shoved at you when you are using your devices?
I was on DuckDuckGo this morning trying to fix things and wow the ads, really made me miss searXNG.
Luckily I do not get spam, I spin up a new address for everything so I did not get those ads at least.
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 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.
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.
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.
What are these ads you speak of? 😎
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.
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…
But actually, specifically on the topic of reddit…
I use https://safereddit.com/ a lot. It’s just the one LibRedirect is pointed to.
Nice! I use Redreader on my phone - and for some reason, it still actually works.
https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader
There are one or two very niche communities that I visit on reddit for technical know how (though I did visit their version of self hosted recently - typical endemic Reddit clusterfuck). I really should put the effort into posting on !LocalLlama more…I’m doing some shenanigans with LLMs that are probably worth a write up at some stage (if I can pull it all together). It’s probably relevant here too. Urgh…these rabbit hole / squeeze blood from stone projects will kill me one day.
I’ve actually got to sit down today and do some coding…I know what needs doing but the task is a massive p.i.t.a. Best get the instant coffee brewing, Sisyphus…ain’t nobody writing this shit for you.
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.
Your mom always gives up the pihole.
