I ordered a Raspberry Pi 5 so I have a Pi 3 that’s about to be redundant. I haven’t used Pi-Hole so I was thinking it’d be good for that but I’m curious if there’s any downsides for users. Are sites blocked if you dont whitelist them? That sort of thing.

Basically, I’m not worried about me having issues but I’m worried about a maintenance headache if friends and family can’t access things.

  • clif
    33•9 months ago

    Occasionally it's caused some problems with the tracking crapware that the spouse's company uses in their web platform. Since they work from home and it breaks the main site they use for work, I've had to add some exceptions.

    I've also seen it occasionally cause problems on websites that rely on tracking garbage and outright fail when they're blocked. Usually I just never go there again but in a few cases it's been something I was forced to use so I just disable the pihole for five minutes, do what I need, and hope to never visit that site again.

    I think there have been maybe eight of these occurrences in the past five years so it's not a continual annoyance. No big deal and definitely worth it.

    • pancakesyrupyum
      12•9 months ago

      “eight of these occurrences”

      I’ve been using various forms of adblock for many years. If a website refuses to show you the information it contains: the information it has is probably toxic garbage.

      I’ve lived by “if it doesn’t load, I doesn’t need it” for over a decade and I’ve never encountered a problem I couldn’t easily solve better without the troublesome webpage.

      • @tal@lemmy.today
        2•9 months ago

        If a website refuses to show you the information it contains: the information it has is probably toxic garbage.

        Ehhh. I've seen a number of news websites that have a "turn off your ad blocker" thing, and I'd imagine that this could trip that. They aren't malware sites.

      • clif
        1•8 months ago

        While I agree with the sentiment, it doesn't really pan out for "complete this contract/form if you want to get paid" or "your job requires you to use our internal platform all day every day and we added click tracking to it but aren't smart enough to make the site function when it's blocked"