[surround]

How to make a block list:

1) Find a bunch of high-quality block lists on the internet which have been painstakingly curated my their maintainers for many years

2) Combine it all into one big list. Tell everyone that you will quickly whitelist any domains if they are causing breakage.

3) Once enough people start using your list, get an advertiser to pay you to silently remove their domains. If anyone notices, just say it was to fix breakage on some obscure site.

I’m not saying that Energized or StevenBlack are doing step 3, but please realize that there are issues with using lists like these. Even if they aren’t getting paid, they might still have some undesirable whitelisted domains. They also deprive the original block list maintainers of views (meaning they might be less inclined to continue maintaining them). You also won’t receive updates from the lists as quickly because of the middle man.

If you are using Pi—hole, OPNsense, or any other tool which can run multiple block lists simultaneously, I recommend taking a look at https://firebog.net for a list of original-source block lists.

[stblack]

I can see how it might seem that way — I'm Steven Black.

I can point to thousands of combined...

* issues https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%...

* ...pull requests... https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Acl...

* ... and commits https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/commits/master

...that indicate, it's not so easy.

The sources we use are all vetted. Some sources are remarkable in terms of activity, and responsiveness to problems as they occur.

Overall I think this area is far more dynamic than many realize. Some good people curate the lists we carry.

[surround]

I don’t mean to belittle your project -

Consolidated block lists like yours are still important for people who are using the traditional etc/hosts file. I believe the Pihole project would like to focus more on the software and less on the block lists - so they include your list, which has a good track record of vetting sources and responding to issues. I also appreciate that your project has produced its own original block lists (which happen to be included on the Energized list and firebog.net).

I just wish more people would use the original source when possible.

I dislike this Energized list, partly because I had a bad experience using one of their non-primary lists which wasn’t well maintained, and partly because their website (https://energized.pro/) makes it sound like a commercial product.