I'm also using NextDNS and one thing that's a huge boon for me is that the default free tier covers my use case insanely well. Given the statistics for the last 3 months I seem to consistently fly under the free tier limit but if I ever do hit it, it will just default back to a regular DNS. A very user-friendly approach and I hope they keep it as they grow.

The other option would be to pay them. :) It's great service and pretty inexpensive, why not support them?

Agreed. They couldn't take my $20 fast enough. Such a great service.

Not gonna claim to know the situation of the folks you're replying to. And Im not gonna pretend these organizations operate for free - if you can reasonably afford it? Supporting them is a great patriotism / praxis / etc for internet denizens.

But I will say this - advertising and tracking has a long, storied history of being a malware infection route. The great boon for all of us from a free-tier DNS-filter service is the additional layer of virus and information protection.

Protecting each other, even inexperienced, or low-budget users? Is the best thing we can do to slow the propagation of malware and institutional information leeches. This in turn protects even the servers of potentially ill-informed or budget-constricted server admins.

We are dealing with internet epidemiology. Free-tier "covid masks" / DNS filters preserve more health than simply for the users actively participating. We have to be in this together, or we will watch each other sink.

Thank you for your time, and sorry for the longwinded Lefty- "Dwight Schrute"-ing. But this entire disclaimer felt necessary to me.

<<The amount of DNS requests made silently in the background is astonishing across all devices.

I still remember seeing the log for the first time. It is very radizalizing.

Energized Protection actually included them all, so you don't need to add them one by one, and nextdns supports it!

Me too! It's blocking a whopping 25%-30% of all requests without a single negative change in my browsing comfort.

I really want to use it but it blocks Spotify playlist links when I try to open them from Reddit.

Check your Nextdns.io logs and see what gets blocked. Then add the blocked domain (or the whole root domain) to the Whitelist. The whitelist always overrides any blocklist entry.

On Apple devices it’s as easy as toggling a switch to temporarily disable it. Not perfect but easy enough. Still trying to figure out a similar solution on Linux...

They added a new setting recently to allow affiliate links like those used for tracking which might include this, try it out.

If your really want to use it you should try diving into what blocklist is causing the block OR whitelist the URL.