I am curious given that I have an Ad-blocker for most websites and am not on FB. How do you even see ads? Have FB et al found a workaround for ad-blockers?
Thanks, this looks great. I put pi-hole on a vps I use, but once I started tinkering with it; it broke.
It's a nice project, but seems fragile. I'm going to try adguard home. I like that it has the ability to control access, so I feel safer running it in the cloud.
For Android there's a FOSS alternative (no root needed) - DNS66, alternatively if one has root there's always AdAway.
The only thing that stops working are monetization schemes in games - "watch this ad to double coins!", etc.
Browser-wise - Firefox on Android has working desktop extensions and it's glorious.
When it comes to native adverts (like timeline stuff in Instagram or Facebook) I just stopped using these platforms on my phone. Less time wasted on mindless scrolling.
I yet need to find a good way to block ads in podcasts. Skipping takes effort and I don't have my hands available for fiddling with the headphone remote.
Facebook spends a lot of time making it hard to block ads on their site. I have turned off adblocking for the site because it is often ineffective for me and sometimes breaks things on the site.
Facebook puts a lot of time and effort into obfuscation of course code. They generate random classes and IDs and interweave containers (divs, spans, custom HTML elements) on each page load so that software can't tell what is content and what is an ad.
What an absolute shame that they waste the time of all their highly-skilled developers on garbage like that. The user has specifically indicated, by running an ad-blocker, that they aren't interested in being marketed to. At least for me, ads that bypass my blockers really irritate me, to the point that whatever company was unfortunate enough to win that bid actually hurts themselves as I will be more likely to select a competitors product.
It is definitely impressive. But it's something that I think could be defeated pretty easily with a pretty simple machine learning model. Could be a fun project!
