Ideally you’d use both. Something like a pihole to serve as a first wall of defense for the entire network, and then additional things like uBlock Origin for any device with a browser that supports it, for some more granular control.
I’m the kind of person who also uses the hosts file from DivestOS on my PC, because why not. Always fun to see how the pihole doesn’t have to block anything on that device because of this.
On that note, Safings’ Portmaster is a nice app if you want to have a graphical overview of what’s going on on a device.
Ideally you’d use both. Something like a pihole to serve as a first wall of defense for the entire network, and then additional things like uBlock Origin for any device with a browser that supports it, for some more granular control.
This is how I keep my home setup.
The pihole has a fairly loose blocking setup because some people in the house need access to things that would normally get blocked and I’m not spending weeks unblocking specific things until everyone is happy.
Behind the pihole everyone has their own suite of browser extensions and software to block what they would like at a much more personal level.
Funny (to me) story when I ran pi-hole in a house with housemates (all friends):
I bought an rpi zero and installed pi-hole on it. I notified all housemates that I would be installing an adblocker on the network so if anyone has any problems with sites not working to just let me know.
Years go by and finally the rpi zero dies which makes the internet inaccessible as the router was pointing to it. I reconfigure the network back to default in the meantime. I didn’t have time to update everyone before one of my housemates made a funny comment.
He mentions that the internet is working again! And something else, he’s now able to click on Google search result ads!
Because I don’t use Google search I never realised Google ads links were being blocked, and even if I did I wouldn’t have realised how common it is for people to rely on the ads!
After some discussion with this housemate he confessed he actually likes seeing ads as it could show him stuff he wants to buy. Needless to say I didn’t bother putting pi-hole back on the network.
I’m not too annoyed by whitelisting certain things, doesn’t happen all too often for our household. So my pihole is fairly strict already, with over one million domains blocked.
Because honestly, I love my familiy, but I can’t trust them to block the right things, and I want them to be as safe and unbothered by ads as possible.
Ideally you’d use both. Something like a pihole to serve as a first wall of defense for the entire network, and then additional things like uBlock Origin for any device with a browser that supports it, for some more granular control.
I’m the kind of person who also uses the hosts file from DivestOS on my PC, because why not. Always fun to see how the pihole doesn’t have to block anything on that device because of this.
On that note, Safings’ Portmaster is a nice app if you want to have a graphical overview of what’s going on on a device.
This is how I keep my home setup.
The pihole has a fairly loose blocking setup because some people in the house need access to things that would normally get blocked and I’m not spending weeks unblocking specific things until everyone is happy.
Behind the pihole everyone has their own suite of browser extensions and software to block what they would like at a much more personal level.
Funny (to me) story when I ran pi-hole in a house with housemates (all friends): I bought an rpi zero and installed pi-hole on it. I notified all housemates that I would be installing an adblocker on the network so if anyone has any problems with sites not working to just let me know.
Years go by and finally the rpi zero dies which makes the internet inaccessible as the router was pointing to it. I reconfigure the network back to default in the meantime. I didn’t have time to update everyone before one of my housemates made a funny comment.
He mentions that the internet is working again! And something else, he’s now able to click on Google search result ads!
Because I don’t use Google search I never realised Google ads links were being blocked, and even if I did I wouldn’t have realised how common it is for people to rely on the ads!
After some discussion with this housemate he confessed he actually likes seeing ads as it could show him stuff he wants to buy. Needless to say I didn’t bother putting pi-hole back on the network.
I’m not too annoyed by whitelisting certain things, doesn’t happen all too often for our household. So my pihole is fairly strict already, with over one million domains blocked.
Because honestly, I love my familiy, but I can’t trust them to block the right things, and I want them to be as safe and unbothered by ads as possible.