Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by winstonprivacy 867 days ago
Sadly for the AdGuard team, there isn't much of an audience for this. It's one of those things everyone says they want but few people will actually install one, much less maintain one over time. Add to that the wife-forced uninstalls and the total long-term audience for this is (no kidding) in the thousands.
3 comments

My spouse’s device is on a pihole exclusion list. Can you not do this with AdGuard?
What is the reason for someone in the network to not want the filtering? Does this break some websites?

My own devices are covered, I definitely want full filtering even when not at home and my devices are completely hackable, but I'm wondering if such a tool would be a convenience for other people using the network in particular with less hackable devices, and people likely to use my network are likely totally uninterested in ads, but I don't want this to be a pain.

Yes, it breaks some websites and apps that they use for work. My pihole also only runs on my “private” network, the “guest” network is not filtered.

Apple’s Private Relay also does not work behind a pihole.

Private Relay does work, but it circumvents the Pihole (so no adblocking).
Okay thanks! I guess I'm not in the target of these things.
I used to need my wife's devices on the whitelist too - she had a job working with tracking and needing to see trackers fire when she loaded webpages etc. I once made a mistake and she got unwhitelisted and waited 4 hours wondering why her tracking codes "weren't working"
It breaks a lot of websites, I used NextDNS for about two years but got tired of the headaches.
Yes, you can definitely use it selectively.
I don't get this comment. It is basically the same kind of tool as the Pihole only much easier to install and maintain. (It's a single go binary) Isn't this a popular class of software?
It is not a popular class of software to the masses, it is a popular class of software to a niche audience. I don't share as pessimistic attitude as OP though. I'm pretty sure the audience is in the tens of thousands!
What's funny is that I was once extremely optimistic about the potential for such a device, to the extent of having sold and delivered a few million in product.

Hard experience taught us that churn is just crazy high, no matter how compatible it easy to use you make it. Getting tens of thousands of stars is not the hard part because it's such an easy concept to like. But I would be surprised there are more than let's say ten thousand piholes in active use.

They have that many stars on GitHub. They actually also have thousands of forks each. The api probably still has a way to count downloads but I didn't bother. I wasn't claiming users in the millions anyway. :)
I guess I'm the exception to the rule, I spent a fair chunk of my previous weekend upgrading the hardware on my opnsense router/firewall so that I could virtualize opnsense and be able to glom on related services exactly like AdGuard Home easily.