I installed Pihole on my home network with a mixed result. Pihole’s job is to stop ads, trackers and all kinds of other internet network nonsense. It works. I was able to see it stop THOUSANDS of things that I never even knew were there.
After testing it for a few days I turned Pihole off because there were two negatives. First, Pihole blocks all ads including the ones you may want to see. For example, I could not click through the links I got on email ads, including those from merchants I willingly use. There’s a workaround for that problem, but it’s too cumbersome for daily use. The second issue was the real problem.
Pihole stops ads by identifying where the ads come from and blocking them. Usually internet ads come from a different server with a different address than the rest of the page content. My main goal with Pihole was to stop the ads on Youtube. Youtube operates differently and the ads and the content are both served from the same source, so Pihole can’t differentiate between the two. End result, no ad blocking on Youtube.
With some tuning I may bring Pihole back with changes in ad restriction. I’m also planning to make one more adjustment to this setup and install Unbound to do some other nerdy gyrations with DNS. Unbound can work with or without Pihole’s ad blocking and will change the way my home network resolves web addresses.