A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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We welcome posts that include suggestions for good self-hosted alternatives to popular online services, how they are better, or how they give back control of your data. Also include hints and tips for less technical readers.
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I run three piholes with gravity sync and have none of the problems you describe.
But pihole isn’t big magic it’s basically a dnsmasq with some management stuff around it. you could host a dnsmasq yourself and just fill the filter rules in the config file your self with ansible. The adliges are publicly available just get them with Ansible and parse them into a dnsmasq config template.
Here is an blog about it. https://alblue.bandlem.com/2020/05/using-dnsmasq.html
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I run a pihole stack with unbound for a recursive dns cache and stubby for dns over tls. I am looking into a dnsmasq server in between pihole and unbound that will update local dns with labels from my docker-compose files. That would complete me.
Unbound really speeds up dns requests
What about going a totally different way like using NextDNS? You can use any ad blocker lists you would with a PiHole
Been running PiHole now for at least 5 years without issue. Sounds like you have something else going on.
It's just dnsmasq at the core, which has been around for ages.