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title: My Dalliance with an Ad-Filled Web
date: 2024-03-10 14:43:00
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A few months ago, I decided to take a look at the technical
infrastructure running my home, and came to the conclusion
that—were I to die—it would be damn-near impossible for my family
to understand what the hell is happening under the hood, let alone
maintain it all.
So I did the unthinkable and tore down my entire home-based,
self-hosted infrastructure. The smart-home stuff got rolled out of
Home Assistant and back into an old Samsung SmartThings Hub I had
laying around, wireless infrastructure got migrated away from
dd-wrt-powered access points and back into my old Google Mesh Wifi
setup, and my handful of headless servers got
decommissioned—including my Raspberry Pi running AdGuard Home, the
whole-home adblocker.
At first, I tried just setting up [NextDNS](
https://nextdns.io/) as
the primary DNS server for the Google network, but ran into some
severe network performance issues as a result (something that I'm
sure is my fault and not NextDNS's fault), so instead I setup
[Cloudflare for
Families](
https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-1-1-1-1-for-families/)
to at least block malware at the network level and moved on with my
life.
And then... holy shit.
I hadn't been in the belly of the ad-supported beast in a _very_
long time.
When the hell did the web become so damned unusable? Slowly, and
then all at once, every device on my network started showing ads in
places I didn't even know were reserved for ads. It was like the
all-seeing eye of commercialism had turned its attention towards my
family and made every online experience objectively worse.
So, as of today, I have re-set up the one piece of custom
infrastructure I had hoped I could do without: my ad-blocking
Raspberry Pi. Everything has been up-and-running for about... 30
minutes or so now, and already 25% of my network traffic has been
blocked by the little-server-that-could.
What a nightmare.
>> This is post 038 of #100DaysToOffload
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