this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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So I’m a bit new to the homenetworking and homelab situation but I have a Unifi DM-SE as my router and I’m trying to establish the best way to block ads at home and away.

So I am currently primarily using either extensions or content blocking apps on my devices to block ads but I’ve been looking into DNS based solutions lately.

I’ve looked into setting up PiHole and it looks pretty simple to do and I have a dedicated small computer with Proxmox that I use for things like Homebridge, Scrypted and I think could set it up easily on there. But it looks like it only works at home. A lot of people say you can set up a VPN but I’d rather not have to turn on and off my VPN on my phone whenever I leave home.

I also looked into Next DNS which seems also pretty easy to setup, but I couldn’t tell if it’s better to set this up per device or network wide via my router.

There’s also the extensions and content blocking apps which would be device specific.

Which is the fastest, performance wise, and easiest to interact with daily?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago
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