Homelab

I just use AdGuard Home. For me it works better then PiHole and runs native on my opnsense box.

I like blocky adblocker (https://github.com/0xERR0R/blocky). It is easy to configure using YAML file and also easy to backup.

You can setup Wireguard VPN server. On your phone, set the VPN DNS server to your adblocker IP and set on-demand connection to only connect to VPN when it is not connected to your home network.

In any case, if you want to filter your traffic when you're away (be it with a network ad blocker or a proxy server) you will need to have a way to connect to said server.

Local browser extensions only detect what has been shipped to the browser by the web server, which is why they work at home or on mobile data, all the processing is done locally on the device.

A filtering DNS server, or a proxy server, will position itself between the web server you're trying to join and your device, and take out the ads and tracking. But to be able to use that server, it needs to be on the same network as your device. It's all good when you're at home, but when you're away, suddenly you two are separate. Hence the need for a VPN to connect your phone back to your home network.

You could make it public facing, but that's pretty much the worst thing you could do, security-wise. There are so many automated threats that actively try every waking minute of the day to get into an insecure home network to find of value, or to lay a time bomb that will allow them to do more, that you don't want to mess with that. For real. Don't mess with public-facing services.

TL;DR: If you find value in a service, be ready to pay for it. Either in time or dollars. If you say it's not worth it, you probably won't spend enough time there to care about an AD anyway.

Novel concept: if I consume a significant amount of content from a platform (> ~10 hours a month, and the ADs detract from my experience in a noticeable way, I pay to remove the ADs from that platform.

This group should at least know why as well. Hardware costs money. Power costs money. Cooling costs money. We optimize our labs to run as cheaply as possible, but expect content to be delivered to us freely. Some of you spend more keeping a Plex server operating per month for fewer hours of consumed content than you'd pay YouTube for the same viewing hours.

I've ran an AD blocker a total of 3 days in my life like 6 years ago. The amount of sites that stopped working or became broken was nowhere near the inconvenience of just ignoring the ad in the side bar. I've had 0 issues with drive-by malware, 0 issues with not knowing what link to click. It's odd, staying off the sketchy parts of the Internet seems to lead to a pretty unintrusive Internet experience.

I pay for a YouTube premium family plan and because Google actively incentivizes it, 4 of my friends get it for free as well. I would have gotten the family plan anyway because two individual subs is more than one family, and 6 people get to benefit from it.

I hope the advertisers win. The Internet isn't sustainable long term without a path to profitability. Things become ephemeral, unstable, unusable, and uninteresting if no one cares about making it. How many new creators have you found with interesting content on PeerTube? How many of you are ready to maintain a BBS/forum software in perpetuity because you have an engaged audience? Or there's one popular thread that gets thousands of views per month for some unknown reason?

I don't want ADs to win because I like them. I want them to win because in a world where everyone expects things to be free, someone has to pay. If they don't, the Internet gets more fragmented, and less interesting. Maybe one day that won't be a problem, but at present, platforms serve a role as an aggregator. Somewhere to reliably land and find something that fits your interests. I'm not likely to have as enriching of an experience on natively Lemmy, or in the fediverse, or on PeerTube/Vimeo/Floatplane, etc. because they don't have the content or reach. I might reach them through an offshoot of where I normally spend my time online, but never directly.