Edge browser + uBlock Origin, and YouTube works perfectly without ads.
Firefox works well too. 10.2M blocked requests on my uBlock, and YouTube - and every other site - works perfectly fine.
Re:The Beauty of Having a Pi-Hole
by happyhacks on Monday May 05, 2025 @11:22PM
(#43901539)
youtube was likely broken because
jnn-pa.googleapis.com
was likely in one of the lists - add it to "Exact allow" list
Similarly you can allow
googleadservices.com
but that is too much IMO - I just have a habit now to not click on such results.
Plus staying logged out of YouTube, which seems to avoid their ad-blocker-blocking for now.
To fix that you just need to look through the logs through the native pi-hole UI and whitelist those domains which cause friction with your browsing habits.
The google sponsored search issue was one I also fixed quite quickly.
As for the others those services depend on, again you just need to find them and whitelist them which isn't too tricky to do. Unfortunately pi-hole won't stop everything.
Re:The Beauty of Having a Pi-Hole
by foobahhhhh on Tuesday May 06, 2025 @01:19AM
(#43902027)
Or don't use hostile services
That is also an option yes, however it is challenging in todays world to find products that aren't hostile. Usually its a question of to which degree are they hostile and what can I live with or control.
For the Google issue, I’ve been using Kagi as a search tool for the last 2 weeks and love it. No ads and great results that can be personalized. I’m on the free version but will likely start the subscription soon.
I've found my complaint about having a pi-hole is there are a number of services I use that expect/depend on ads existing in order to function. Things like, some shows on paramount+ (as an example) will fail to play (hang indefinitely) if an ad hasn't run before one of their shows, even though it theoretically shouldn't have ads?
Additionally, the other thing I run into, is that the first page of google is basically useless to me, even when the top result is an ad to the thing that I want, because when I click on the ad link, the pi-hole doesn't route me to the link I want. So I find I have to scroll down a half-page to get to the regular link I googled for.
If anyone has any workarounds for these issues, I've otherwise really enjoyed having a pi-hole. (Though my friends frequently tell me to stop talking about it, they'll say "shut your pi-hole", really weird).
Edit: Seems like they recommend tailoring the list of accepted domains for things in the article. (Will do this for paramount, I guess).
For Google, I separately stopped using an ad-blocker because it broke youtube when I did, even though I shouldn't get ads on youtube to begin with... God I hate the internet some days. But I imagine the easiest thing to do is to add that back so I can ignore those links.