A few months ago I set up a Pi-hole at home. I tried to create a decent blacklist by first adding some regexes I found online and then doing some manual optimization by finding ads and blocking the ad requester through the queries page. But in the end it did not work so well. I still get a lot of YouTube ads, for example. So I still rely on uBlock for my ad-blocking.
I just read that Chrome is planning to start weakening ad blocker plugins. I use Firefox, but it is still worrying that the space could potentially keep moving in this direction over time. So I am now more invested in learning how to have more control over my ad-blocking.
Has any of you managed to optimize your Pi-hole to the point that it is possible to browse the internet without an ad-blocker? If so, how did you do it? Are there other good ad-blocking alternatives?
I mostly installed the lists found on https://firebog.net/, that’s it.
From my experience, the only way to get rid of YT ads is Brave browser. Firefox with uBlock Origins is not enough, or maybe I just misconfigured it. I haven’t tried Librewolf… but I think it’d be the same.
Pihole will only ever be able to block so much, because it works at the domain level. When ads are served from the same domain as the desired content, which I believe is the case for youtube, Pihole is ineffective.
Adblocking plugins aren’t limited by this and can filter the actual content and HTTP requests made by the browser.
