Ask HN: What ist your AdBlock strategy?

If you run adguard home with long blocklists on a consumer-level router, this will cause big delays, simply because the blocklists are large and eat all available memory and lots of processing on any dns request.

I've kept de blocklists in adguard home small, and then it works fine, but if I add hundreds of thousands of blocked domains, it gets painfully slow on my Edgerouter X running OpenWRT

uBlock Origin on Chrome. Which any day now will become uBlock Origin on Facebook.

DNS ad blocking doesn't work well anymore, too many sites block you if you use it. But I use NextDNS for my mobile devices anyway because there's nothing you can easily use that's better. Firefox does have an Android build that will load uBlock Origin but I am still using Chrome on my phone.

My strategy is based around a single premise: zero tolerance on advertising other than self-promotion or mentions of products directly related to subject of the page I am on. With that last bit I mean the products actually have to be part of the thing I'm reading, e.g. when I'm reading something about how to solder some specific type of component I'm fine with the solder being mentioned together with a link where the stuff can be bought. I'm not fine with 'electronics-related advertising' in a story on electronics, that falls under the zero tolerance part.

I use a defence-in-depth strategy to block unwanted content:

1: on the router (OpenWRT running in a container on Proxmox), network blocking using nftables sets. This includes both advertising-related networks as well as emerging threats.

2: on the router, DNS blocking using several block lists as well as my own custom lists.

3: on the router, DNS masquerading to enforce the use of my own DNS server. This only works for applications which use normal DNS so I tend to disable DoH (DNS over HTTP) and other such things when possible. If applications insist on trying to force me to use their own idea of what a DNS service looks like I will stop using those applications if there are useable alternatives. This is my network, these are my computers, this is my domain, this is my internet connection and I am the one who controls which traffic goes where.

3: on client devices, network blocking using nftables sets or (on some devices) ipset lists.

4: on client devices, DNS blocking using the host file

5: on some Android client devices, content blocking through a device-local VPN

6: on client applications like browsers, content blocking through either extensions like uBlock Origin and/or by using native content blocking capabilities (e.g. the Cromite browser on Android which I use when I have to test something with a non-Firefox browser)

7: as a last resort, my hands and eyes. If somehow advertising makes it way past all the hurdles I throw in its path I just close the page/application/window/. Thou Shall Not Pass and that's it.

While all this may sound like a lot of work it actually is not. I set up the blocking on the router once and keep the lists up to date automatically using a cron job. The same is true for client devices. Once installed the stuff mostly does its job without bothering me apart from some pages not working - so what, there's enough alternatives out there. I don't like ads, get it? No ads, zip, nada, zilch. Don't Advertise On Me.

Brave browser + uBlock Origin is still great for a Chromium-flavored experience too.

At home Pihole, on mobile Firefox + uBlock Origin