this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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In unrelated news. Alway use a Pihole for your network and a DNS sink (e.g. 1Blocker) on your devices. What would you use on Android for that?
I mean, there are two problems here.
The first problem is solving this for the kind of people who are going to set up the above on their networks.
The other is solving it for the general public, which I would suggest is harder.
Yet, it is the only way forward, unless you can convince commercial entities (techbros) to play by fair rules.
I use wireguard to VPN back into my network so I'm back on pihole !
I've never tried Pihole but maybe I'll try to set it up. What happens when ads try to play when it's enabled? Are they just blank? Or if someone is watching a streaming service and an ad tries to come up what happens?
Also what happens if the device running Pihole goes down, as in if I have it running from an old device and it loses connection or restarts. Does everything just stop resolving names until it's back up? (I assume that's what happens like normal dns servers, but I'm trying to think of a device I have that won't be shut off, my media server has a lot going on with it at the moment, and is far from my router, I should move it)
If the ad is under a filtered domain, it will simply not load. If the ad is under the same domain as the site you are using (ex. Youtube) they will load just fine.
When the primary DNS is down, the secondary DNS will be used. This is the same regardless if PiHole is used or not, but is how DNS works.
Many add just don't show up. The reserved space stays white. Also, depending on the aggressiveness of your block list, some pages don't resolve (just like they never existed). E.g when you click on adds in a google search result, it leads to nowhere.
Short outtakes make no difference. It is your primary source for matching names to IPs. Depending on your configuration you can have alternative sources.
Been running an AWS Lightsail instance for years, and before that on prem. Don't even notice it's running! But when I see other people's internet experience I'm left thinking, "What's all this crap?!"
Ex-wife was bitching about my "blueberry pie" or whatever fucking up FaceBook links. FINE. Turned it off. "The internet's slow!" Looked over her shoulder:
"See all that stuff loading? Ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad..."
"FINE! Turn it back on!"
Haven't logged into my instance for a year or more, no maintenance. Going to move it back to a Raspberry Pi or a VM when I get motivated. On Windows 11 now and M$ totally hosed Hyper-V for desktop operating systems and I don't want to spin another computer.
tl;dr: WELL worth spending an evening on the project. Hardest part is spinning up a Debian or Ubuntu server, VM or bare metal. The install is hilariously simple.
Comically enough I didn't think about it long, I actually had it up and running on my jellyfin server by 11 this morning. Haven't played with it much yet just set my router DNS to it.
So now it's my jellyfin/Files/Caddy/DNS server. It's an old HP laptop my spouse has that I just hard wired and remote into using RustDesk. Works great even though the network cards arent great, and most of the storage is just an external USB drive.
Could use mullvad DNS.
Not exactly what I was aiming for. 1Blocker works as local VPN. It reroutes all iPhone traffic through a local firewall/App, that drops suspicious DNS queries.
sounds like you are looking for rethink
https://github.com/celzero/rethink-app
Would it be overkill to use that with my graphenOS phone, where I don’t do much browsing etc.?
i dont think so, it mostly stays out of the way once its set up anyway
Does pihole help with this sort of tracking? I've never bothered setting it up because I thought it was just for adblocking and I already use ublock, but if it has other uses I might look into it
Rethink/Adguard/pihole all interfere with the DNS lookup. Depending on the quality of your blocklist, the servers they try to send the data too will simply not be reachable.
You can use the private DNS function with an ad blocking DNS server like AdGuard.