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Comment by smileybarry | Hacker News Reader

I started using NextDNS years ago and it's been a blessing. Blocks almost every ad on a DNS level on mobile devices, and on PC I still augment it with uBlock Origin. Per-device logs also let me debug connectivity if something breaks, and it's great for mapping local device names without mDNS debugging or some dnsmasq resolver lying around.

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I did the same and I must say it has been a breeze to use. I even configured my own list for my family member's devices and am still not reaching the free-tier quota. I even unplugged my PiHole because this was much simpler.

I was happily on the free tier for a while until I switched to iPhone, then suddenly just my iPhone ran though 150k queries (compared to a Pixel). But if you're on Android, Google TV, etc. you should be comfortably fine within the free tier.

It's definitely worth the $2/month price for Pro though.

I think DNS-based blocking will eventually be less effective over time. It shouldn't be difficult to host ads on the main domain, modern distributed reverse proxies are very fast. So they will probably soon just stop using ad-only domains and host everything on the main one.

Yes, NextDNS and Brave is my stack.

Sadly, it doesn't work on IG.

But I have blocked a few meme sites, and now I'm doing less mindless scrolling.

I regularly find websites that don’t work until I disable the Adblock, usually on mobile. This isn’t intentional generally.

How do you deal with that? Are you just not going to buy a plane ticket on the airline’s website just ‘cause?

Turning off affiliate blocking fixed 99% of those, and the rest I just manually add to my allowlist. It’s not many but if that doesn’t fix quickly then I just switch it off for a minute.

There is a blocklist with the explicit goal to not break sites (at the expense of sometimes being tracked or seeing an ad): https://oisd.nl/

> Why this list?

> Where most other blocklists go for the "block ads/trackers and when something breaks it's up to the user to figure out what to whitelist"-approach ..

> This list prioritizes functionality over blocking.

> Thís is the list to use at home, at work or at your (grand-)parents place.

> Users report it "passes the girlfriend-test" ;)

I used to run more strict lists and then whitelist domains or temporarily disable blocking, but I have to say I switched to oisd only and now I'm seeing maybe 0.5% more ads without having to go through that hassle, which is a fine compromise for me.

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