[skinner927]

I think this is an unfair critique of the PiHole and I believe you’re throwing the baby out with the bath water. The PiHole blocks DNS and that’s all it’s designed to do, and it does it well. There’s a grandiose amount of telemetry, marketing, and general unsavory traffic flying through your network that didn’t originate from a browser. The PiHole is not exactly a turnkey solution and does take some adjusting to your preferences, but once you get it set up, you basically only have to touch it to do system updates.

[Salgat]

The problem is that unless you're willing to do surgery on a regular basis as you come across blocked sites, PiHole is going to cause more problems than it solves when you have your entire family using it. Even google stops working correctly because results for products on the front page start leading to blocked links. I like PiHole, but I had to stop using it because it was so aggravating for my wife.

[eertami]

I used a PiHole for a while but after a corrupted SD card I said screw it and started using NextDNS. I have very few subscriptions, in fact nothing else except Spotify, but this one was worth the time saved and hasn't required any maintenance on my end.

[ukuina]

Why not AdGuard DNS? It's free.

[xethos]

How heartwarming that they run such a wonderful service purely out of the goodness of their hearts, with no income from it, and no expectation of financial compensation.

[ukuina]

It forms the backbone of their paid AdGuard apps on iOS, MacOS and Android. Those apps create a loopback VPN on your system so they can reroute the DNS requests to AdGuard DNS.

[BLKNSLVR]

> google stops working correctly because results for products on the front page start leading to blocked links.

Because they're often ads made to look like search results. Pi-hole working as intended.

That's my experience anyway. My family network is behind a pi-hole and rarely if ever does an intended website visit break as a result.

[lolinder]

I have our PiHole set up with just ad lists, not trackers or privacy. I follow that up on my own devices with uBO with more thorough lists, but this way my whole family gets ad protection rather than nothing.

[spaceisballer]

I’m a novice, and figured it out and have zero maintenance. Unless you count occasionally updating pihole every now and then. I have a word file with all my exceptions (mostly white lists for Microsoft gaming stuff my kids want) in the event I ever need to reload (ever since I switched to a better SD never have had corruption issues). I understand the spouse issue, mine loves clicking ads on her phone. Easiest workaround is to pop off WiFi click link then go back to WiFi.

[sizzle]

This is not my experience. Pihole works flawlessly for me and it’s sitting in my closet connected to my cable modem. Haven’t touched it in a year. No broken mainstream sites and I’m blocking telemetry and other crap from apple, Amazon, google, Netflix, Hulu, Wyze, etc. related to advertising and device analytics trying to profile my usage. Pi-hole has been a blessing in the war on privacy and targeted advertising.