So I’m a bit new to the homenetworking and homelab situation but I have a Unifi DM-SE as my router and I’m trying to establish the best way to block ads at home and away.
So I am currently primarily using either extensions or content blocking apps on my devices to block ads but I’ve been looking into DNS based solutions lately.
I’ve looked into setting up PiHole and it looks pretty simple to do and I have a dedicated small computer with Proxmox that I use for things like Homebridge, Scrypted and I think could set it up easily on there. But it looks like it only works at home. A lot of people say you can set up a VPN but I’d rather not have to turn on and off my VPN on my phone whenever I leave home.
I also looked into Next DNS which seems also pretty easy to setup, but I couldn’t tell if it’s better to set this up per device or network wide via my router.
There’s also the extensions and content blocking apps which would be device specific.
Which is the fastest, performance wise, and easiest to interact with daily?
Fair, one of my points was the similar to an another commenter’s: The blocking is becoming more intrusive than ignoring the ADs. I think we’re just delaying the inevitable where sites start to pull all of their content through JavaScript, and if anything interferes with the display, it just doesn’t display at all. Or injecting full unskippable ADs in video streams.
When I tried one 6 years ago, the experience of using the Internet was worse than without blocking. The ADs I am served now are less of an inconvenience to me than the constant fight to tune and block them that I see people complain about.