Daniel sent us this one — he's got a vendetta against tracking pixels, which I fully endorse, and he's looking at network-level blocking tools. He's running OPNsense, he's wondering whether to add AdGuard Home or Pi-hole on top of that, or just do everything inside OPNsense itself. The core tension is real — you want to block creepy tracking and spammy ads, but you don't want to break Google Analytics when you need it for work, and you don't want to spend your life curating blocklists while your household yells that the internet is broken. What's a sensible posture here, and how do AdGuard Home and Pi-hole actually compare for someone in this situation?
I love this question because it's not just "which tool is better" — it's about where you draw the line between protection and usability, and that's genuinely hard. And Daniel's right that tracking pixels are awful. These are single-pixel images embedded in emails and web pages that report back when you open something, where you are, what device you're using, how long you looked at it. It's surveillance infrastructure dressed up as marketing analytics.
The thing that gets me is how invisible it is. Most people have no idea that opening a newsletter fires off a dozen requests to tracking domains they've never heard of. Daniel mentioned that moment when you first look at the dashboard and see the numbers — that's a wake-up call.
It really is. Let me ground this in what these tools actually do. Both Pi-hole and AdGuard Home operate primarily as DNS sinkholes. When a device on your network tries to resolve a domain — say, doubleclick dot net or a tracking pixel domain — the DNS server checks it against blocklists. If it's on the list, the server returns a null response or redirects to a local page. The request never reaches the tracking service. That's the core mechanism.
They're both fundamentally DNS-level tools. But Daniel's already got OPNsense, which can do DNS filtering through its own plugins. What's the case for adding a separate layer?
This is where the OPNsense ecosystem gets interesting. There is a community plugin called os-adguardhome-maxit that integrates AdGuard Home directly into OPNsense, so it runs as a service on the firewall itself rather than on a separate box or container. But a lot of people still run a dedicated device — a Raspberry Pi, a small x86 box, a VM — because it gives them more control and keeps the filtering logic separate from the firewall configuration. If you mess up a firewall rule, you don't want your DNS filtering to go down with it.
That separation of concerns argument makes sense. But let's get concrete about the differences between AdGuard Home and Pi-hole, because Daniel specifically asked about that comparison. What's the real delta?
The big one is that AdGuard Home has encrypted DNS protocols built in natively — DNS over HTTPS, DNS over TLS, DNS over QUIC. Pi-hole has supported DNS over HTTPS for a while now too, but AdGuard Home's implementation is more mature and easier to configure. AdGuard Home also has native DNS over TLS, which Pi-hole requires a separate proxy like cloudflared to handle. If you care about your ISP seeing your DNS queries — and Daniel clearly does — that matters.
Wait, so if I'm running Pi-hole without setting up encrypted upstream DNS, my ISP can still see every domain my household is querying, even if the tracking domains are being blocked?
The blocking happens locally, but the queries that do go through to an upstream resolver — like Google's eight eight eight eight or Cloudflare's one one one one — those are sent in plaintext unless you've configured encryption. Your ISP sees "this household just queried bank of america dot com at two thirty in the morning" or whatever. AdGuard Home makes encrypting those upstream queries a checkbox exercise.
That's a pretty significant practical difference. What about the blocklist ecosystems Daniel mentioned?
Both support the same standard blocklist formats — domain lists, host files, adblock-style syntax. The default lists differ slightly, but both let you subscribe to whatever lists you want — OISD, EasyList, someone's curated tracking pixel list on GitHub. The real difference is in the management interface and how they handle custom filtering rules.
I've seen people complain about Pi-hole's interface feeling dated. Is that fair?
Pi-hole's web interface is functional but it hasn't changed much in years. It's a PHP application with a dark theme option. AdGuard Home's interface is significantly more modern — it's a single-page application with real-time query logging, better filtering and search, and a more intuitive layout for managing client-specific rules. For someone like Daniel who doesn't want to spend all day configuring things, the UX difference alone might tip the scales.
Daniel also mentioned the problem of things breaking — you block a domain and suddenly Google Analytics stops loading, or some login page breaks because it's pulling from a blocked CDN. How do these tools handle that inevitable friction?
This is where the query log becomes your best friend. Both tools show you every DNS query in real time or near-real time. When something breaks, you open the log, find the blocked domain that's causing the issue, and add it to your allowlist with one click. AdGuard Home's log is searchable and filterable in ways that Pi-hole's basic query log isn't — you can filter by client, by block status, by domain pattern, all in real time.
The workflow is: something breaks, you open AdGuard Home, you see the blocked domain highlighted in red, you click "allow," and you're done. That's actually not bad.
It's not bad at all. And both tools support per-client rules, which is crucial for Daniel's use case. He needs Google Analytics for work, but maybe his kids don't need to be feeding data to Google's tracking infrastructure. You can set up a client group for his work machine that has a more permissive filtering policy, while everything else on the network gets the strict blocklists.
That's the kind of nuance that makes this practical rather than ideological. Speaking of ideology — Daniel framed this as a war, and I appreciate the candor. But let's talk about what these tools actually stop versus what they don't.
This is the misconception I see most often. DNS-level blocking stops tracking domains from resolving. If a website embeds a pixel from doubleclick dot net, and doubleclick dot net is on your blocklist, that request never leaves your network. But DNS blocking does nothing against first-party tracking — where the website itself collects analytics and sends them to its own domain. It doesn't stop browser fingerprinting, which uses your screen resolution, installed fonts, and WebGL characteristics to identify you uniquely without any third-party requests. It doesn't stop IP address tracking.
If a website is running its own analytics on its own domain — analytics dot the website dot com — a Pi-hole won't touch that.
And more and more tracking is moving to first-party domains precisely because third-party cookies and third-party tracking are getting blocked by browsers. Apple's Intelligent Tracking Prevention, Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection, even Chrome's slowly-evolving privacy sandbox — they're all pushing the industry toward first-party tracking, which DNS blocking can't address without breaking the website entirely.
That's a good reality check. These tools are necessary but not sufficient. What about the performance angle? Daniel's running OPNsense — if he adds AdGuard Home as a plugin on the firewall itself, is there a latency concern?
DNS resolution is measured in milliseconds. A local resolver on your network will typically respond in under five milliseconds for cached queries. For comparison, querying Google's eight eight eight eight from a typical home connection might take twenty to thirty milliseconds. So you're actually speeding things up for cached domains. The overhead is negligible.
What about the blocklist size? Daniel mentioned seeing alarming numbers on the dashboard — and I've seen setups where people subscribe to every blocklist they can find and then wonder why half the internet is broken.
This is where the "basic posture" part of Daniel's question really matters. My recommendation is to start with one well-maintained, moderate blocklist. The OISD full list is a good choice because it's actively curated to minimize false positives while blocking the major tracking and advertising domains. The AdGuard DNS filter is also solid. Don't stack five aggressive lists on day one.
Because every additional list increases the false positive rate, and you'll spend more time allowlisting than you saved by blocking.
And the false positive problem compounds when you have multiple people using the network. Your spouse clicks a link in a promotional email and it goes through a tracking redirect that gets blocked, and suddenly you're getting a text message asking why the internet is broken. That's the usability tension Daniel's worried about.
There's also the question Daniel raised about IoT devices. He mentioned wanting to protect everything on the network, not just his own browser. How do these tools handle devices that don't give you a choice about what DNS server they use?
Some IoT devices — looking at you, Google Nest and Amazon Echo — have hardcoded DNS servers. They'll ignore your DHCP-assigned DNS and go straight to eight eight eight eight or whatever the manufacturer baked in. To catch those, you need to redirect all outbound DNS traffic on port fifty-three at the firewall level. OPNsense can do this with NAT rules — you create a port forward that intercepts any DNS request not destined for your AdGuard Home or Pi-hole and redirects it. That's one of the strongest arguments for running the DNS filter alongside a proper firewall like OPNsense.
The OPNsense plus AdGuard Home combination is actually more powerful than either alone, because the firewall can force every device to play by the rules.
And this is where I'd gently push back on the idea of doing everything within OPNsense itself. OPNsense has its own DNS resolver — Unbound — and you can configure it with blocklists. There's also the Sensei plugin for deeper packet inspection. But the user experience for managing blocklists, viewing query logs, and handling allowlisting is nowhere near as polished as AdGuard Home or Pi-hole.
It's the classic trade-off between integration and usability. OPNsense can do it all, but you'll be editing configuration files and squinting at logs. AdGuard Home gives you a nice interface but adds another service to maintain.
Maintenance is worth discussing. Pi-hole updates are straightforward — you run "pihole dash up" from the command line. AdGuard Home has a built-in update mechanism in the web interface. Both get regular updates. Pi-hole's development pace has slowed somewhat — the core functionality is stable, but new features have been sparse. AdGuard Home is under more active development, with features like DNS over QUIC and improved DHCP server functionality landing in the past year.
Let's talk about the DHCP angle, because that's another practical consideration. If someone's setting up a Pi-hole or AdGuard Home, do they need to also run a separate DHCP server?
Both can act as DHCP servers, which is convenient. But if you're already running OPNsense, OPNsense is handling DHCP, and you probably want to keep it that way. The DNS filter just needs to be set as the DNS server in your DHCP options. That way, every device that joins the network automatically gets the filtering without any per-device configuration.
For mobile devices that leave the network? Daniel mentioned wanting to share the protection with everyone in the household. What happens when someone takes their phone to a coffee shop?
They lose the protection, unless you set up a VPN back to your home network or use something like AdGuard's public DNS service on the device as a fallback. AdGuard offers a public DNS over HTTPS endpoint that does filtering — it's not as customizable as running your own instance, but it's better than nothing. Some people run AdGuard Home on a VPS and point all their devices at it regardless of where they are. That's a more advanced setup, but it's doable.
The architecture Daniel's describing — OPNsense at the edge, AdGuard Home or Pi-hole inside — is really about protecting the home network. Mobile protection is a separate problem.
And the home network is where the IoT devices live, where the smart TV lives, where the guests connect. Those are the devices that can't run browser extensions or local ad blockers. Network-level filtering is the only way to protect them.
Let's circle back to the specific comparison Daniel asked for. If someone is setting this up today, fresh install, no existing investment — AdGuard Home or Pi-hole?
For most people, especially someone who values a modern interface and encrypted DNS out of the box, I'd recommend AdGuard Home. The setup is straightforward — it's a single binary, you run it, you configure it through the web interface. It handles DNS over HTTPS, DNS over TLS, and DNS over QUIC natively. The query log is excellent. The client management is intuitive. It's actively maintained.
The case for Pi-hole?
Pi-hole has a larger community and more extensive documentation because it's been around longer. If you're going to run into an obscure edge case, someone on the Pi-hole forums has probably solved it. It's also extremely lightweight — it runs comfortably on a Raspberry Pi Zero with half a gig of RAM. And some people simply prefer its simplicity. For a set-it-and-forget-it deployment where you don't want to think about it again, Pi-hole is perfectly adequate.
Daniel specifically said he wants to block tracking pixels, and he wants to do it without making the internet unusable. That implies he's going to be interacting with the tool — checking the query log, tuning blocklists, managing per-client rules. That sounds like AdGuard Home's strengths.
I think that's right. The query log in AdGuard Home is useful in a way that Pi-hole's basic log isn't. You can see, in real time, which client queried which domain, whether it was blocked or allowed, and why — which blocklist rule matched. When something breaks, you can find the problem in seconds. That's the difference between a tool you curse at and a tool you actually use.
Daniel mentioned that initial shock of seeing the dashboard — all those blocked requests piling up. There's something almost therapeutic about watching the numbers climb and knowing those tracking pixels are dying in the dark.
It's satisfying in a very concrete way. But it also reveals how much tracking infrastructure is embedded in everyday browsing. A typical household might see thirty to forty percent of all DNS queries blocked when you first set up a moderate blocklist. That's not thirty to forty percent of web traffic — DNS queries are lightweight — but it's a huge number of tracking domains being contacted constantly.
Thirty to forty percent? That's wild. So for every ten DNS lookups your network does, three or four are just surveillance.
That's with a moderate list. People who run aggressive blocklists see even higher numbers. The question is how many of those blocked domains are actually tracking versus how many are legitimate CDNs or analytics platforms that websites need to function.
Which brings us to the allowlist problem. Daniel mentioned not wanting to spend all day configuring whitelists and blacklists. Is there a middle ground between "block everything and constantly fix things" and "block nothing and accept the surveillance"?
The middle ground is what I'd call a curated moderate posture. Start with one well-maintained list — OISD or the AdGuard DNS filter. Run it for a week. When something breaks, allowlist the specific domain that caused the problem. Don't add more blocklists until you've gone at least two weeks without a false positive issue. Most people will find that a single moderate list blocks the vast majority of tracking and advertising without breaking anything important.
If you do need to allowlist something for work — Google Analytics, say — you do it per-client. Daniel's work machine gets an exception. The smart TV doesn't.
And both AdGuard Home and Pi-hole support this. You create a client identifier — either by IP address, MAC address, or hostname — and apply a different filtering policy. AdGuard Home calls them "client settings," Pi-hole calls them "group management.
Let's talk about the OPNsense integration specifically, because that's Daniel's starting point. He's already got OPNsense. What does adding AdGuard Home look like in practice?
There are two approaches. One is the community plugin — os-adguardhome-maxit. You install it through the OPNsense plugin manager, and it runs AdGuard Home as a service on the firewall. The plugin handles the integration — it sets up the necessary network configuration, it ties into OPNsense's service management. The other approach is running AdGuard Home on a separate device — a Raspberry Pi, an old laptop, a VM on a NAS — and pointing OPNsense's DNS settings at it.
What are the trade-offs?
Running it on the firewall is simpler — one less device to maintain. But it means your DNS filtering goes down if the firewall goes down, which it would anyway since the firewall is your gateway. The bigger concern is resource usage on the firewall. AdGuard Home is lightweight, but OPNsense on modest hardware might not have headroom for additional services. Running it separately gives you isolation and lets you use a device with more storage for query logs and statistics.
Daniel strikes me as someone who'd appreciate the elegance of having it all on one box.
And for a home network with typical usage — a few dozen devices, a few people — the resource overhead is minimal. AdGuard Home uses maybe fifty to a hundred megabytes of RAM with a moderate blocklist and a typical query load. Even a low-power firewall appliance can handle that.
You mentioned the community plugin. Is that officially supported, or is this a "hope the maintainer doesn't disappear" situation?
It's community-maintained, which is worth acknowledging. The OPNsense project doesn't officially bundle or support it. That said, it's actively maintained and widely used. If that makes Daniel uncomfortable, running AdGuard Home on a separate device is the safer bet — it's completely independent of OPNsense's update cycle and plugin ecosystem.
Let's address another practical concern. Daniel mentioned that sometimes things just won't work — you try to access something and it's silently broken. How do you communicate this to other people in the household who aren't invested in the privacy war?
This is the social engineering problem of network-level blocking. The best approach I've seen is to set up a secondary SSID — a guest network or a "no filtering" network — that bypasses the DNS sinkhole entirely. When something breaks and you don't have time to troubleshoot, you switch to that network. It's not ideal from a privacy perspective, but it keeps the peace.
That's smart. You're not removing the protection, you're providing an escape hatch. And over time, as you build up your allowlist, you need the escape hatch less and less.
And both AdGuard Home and Pi-hole let you exempt specific clients from filtering entirely, so you could also just have certain devices permanently on the unfiltered list if the user of that device doesn't care about tracking and doesn't want to deal with breakage.
What about the performance impact on browsing? Daniel mentioned spammy advertisements — if you're blocking ad domains at the DNS level, do pages actually load faster?
They do, measurably. A typical news website might load content from thirty or forty different domains — the actual article text, images, and then a pile of ad networks, analytics services, and tracking pixels. When your DNS resolver blocks the ad and tracking domains, those requests never happen. The browser doesn't spend time negotiating connections to a dozen ad servers. Pages can load noticeably faster, especially on mobile devices with slower connections.
There's a performance win on top of the privacy win. That's a selling point for the less ideologically motivated members of the household.
"The internet will be faster" is a much easier pitch than "we're fighting surveillance capitalism.
Let's get into the weeds on encrypted DNS a bit more, because I think this is where AdGuard Home really pulls ahead and it's worth understanding why it matters. Daniel's ISP can see his DNS queries if they're unencrypted. What can they actually learn from that?
DNS queries reveal every domain your household visits, down to the subdomain level. Your ISP can see that you visited your bank, your doctor's patient portal, a specific news article about a political topic, a forum for a medical condition you're researching. Even if the actual content of those sites is encrypted with HTTPS — which it almost certainly is — the domain names themselves are incredibly revealing. DNS over HTTPS or DNS over TLS encrypts those queries so your ISP can't see them.
The ISP has a financial incentive to see them, right? They can sell that data.
In many jurisdictions, yes. ISPs have been caught selling browsing data, using it for targeted advertising, or injecting their own ads into unencrypted traffic. Even in places with stronger privacy regulations, the data is collected and stored, and data that's stored can be breached or subpoenaed.
Encrypting DNS is not a niche concern — it's table stakes for anyone who cares about privacy. And AdGuard Home makes it trivial while Pi-hole requires extra configuration.
That's the practical bottom line. Pi-hole can do it, but you need to set up a DNS over HTTPS proxy like cloudflared or dnsproxy, configure it correctly, and point Pi-hole at it. It's not hard for someone comfortable with the command line, but it's an extra step and an extra service to maintain. AdGuard Home has it in the settings panel.
What about DNS over QUIC? You mentioned AdGuard Home supports that now.
DNS over QUIC is the newest encrypted DNS protocol. QUIC is the transport protocol that underlies HTTP/3 — it's designed to be faster and more resilient to packet loss than TCP-based protocols. It's still relatively new and not all upstream resolvers support it yet, but AdGuard Home has it. It's another example of AdGuard Home being ahead on protocol support.
For Daniel's use case — wants to block tracking pixels, wants encrypted DNS, wants a usable interface, doesn't want to spend his life on configuration — AdGuard Home seems like the clear recommendation.
I think so. And specifically, I'd recommend running it as a separate service — either on the OPNsense box via the plugin or on a dedicated device — with one moderate blocklist, encrypted upstream DNS enabled, and per-client rules for work devices that need Google Analytics and similar services.
What about the "versus just doing it in OPNsense" part of Daniel's question? When would you recommend sticking with OPNsense's built-in capabilities?
If you're already running OPNsense with Unbound and you've configured blocklists manually, and you're happy with that setup, there's no burning need to switch. The filtering works the same way under the hood — it's all DNS sinkholing. The difference is entirely in the management experience. If you never need to check query logs or manage allowlists because your setup is stable and you don't have curious household members asking why something's broken, OPNsense alone is fine.
Daniel is clearly going to be interacting with this — he's already anticipating the breakage and the allowlisting. He wants the better interface.
Then AdGuard Home is the answer. And I'd add one more practical tip: set up the AdGuard Home admin interface on a memorable local domain or bookmark it prominently. When something breaks and someone's frustrated, you want to be able to get to the query log in under ten seconds.
That's the kind of operational wisdom that comes from having done this and gotten the angry text messages.
I may have some experience with this. The first month of running network-level blocking is the hardest. You'll get false positives. Something will break at the worst possible moment — someone's trying to complete an online purchase, or join a video call for work, and a blocked CDN domain prevents the page from loading. You fix it, you add the domain to the allowlist, and it happens less over time. After a few months, you barely touch it.
The blocklists themselves evolve, right? Maintainers update them to reduce false positives.
The OISD list, for example, is updated multiple times per day. When a website changes its tracking infrastructure, the list maintainers adapt. When a false positive is reported, it gets fixed. Your AdGuard Home or Pi-hole pulls updates automatically on whatever schedule you configure. So the system gets smarter over time without you doing anything.
Daniel also mentioned the broader ecosystem of blocklists — the whole world of them. Is there a risk of going down a rabbit hole here, where you're subscribed to seventeen different lists and your network is blocking half the internet?
That rabbit hole is real, and I've seen people fall into it. They start with a moderate list, then they discover a list that blocks telemetry, then one that blocks crypto miners, then one that blocks phishing domains, then a regional list for their country — and suddenly everything's broken and they don't know which list caused it. My advice is to resist the urge to stack lists. Pick one well-maintained list that covers your threat model and stick with it.
The threat model point is important. Daniel's threat model is tracking pixels and spammy ads. He's not trying to build an impenetrable fortress. A moderate list covers that.
If you're trying to block every possible form of tracking, you need browser-level tools — uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, container tabs — in addition to DNS blocking. The DNS layer handles the network-level stuff. The browser layer handles the in-page stuff. They complement each other.
For IoT devices that don't have browsers? The DNS layer is all you've got.
Smart TVs, streaming sticks, voice assistants, smart appliances — they're phoning home constantly, and you can't install an ad blocker on them. DNS filtering is the only tool you have. That's why network-level blocking matters even if you're already running uBlock Origin in your browser.
Let's talk about the initial setup experience for someone who's never done this before. Daniel's comfortable with OPNsense, so he's not a novice, but hypothetically — what's the barrier to entry for AdGuard Home?
It's remarkably low. The official AdGuard Home installation script is a single curl command that downloads and runs the installer. It detects your operating system, installs the binary, sets up the service, and gives you a URL to access the admin interface. From there, you configure your upstream DNS servers, enable encrypted DNS if you want it, add blocklists, and you're done. Total time from zero to working filtering is maybe fifteen minutes.
Pi-hole has a similar one-command installer. "curl dash sSL install dot pi dash hole dot net vertical bar bash" — the same basic pattern. It asks you a few questions during setup about your network configuration, and then you're up and running. Both projects have made the installation process as smooth as possible.
The barrier to entry is low for either tool. The differentiation is in the day-to-day experience.
And the day-to-day experience is where AdGuard Home's modern interface, better query log, and native encrypted DNS support make a real difference for someone who's going to be actively managing their filtering.
By the way, today's episode is powered by DeepSeek V4 Pro.
Anyway — there's one more thing I want to mention about AdGuard Home that doesn't get enough attention. It has a built-in DNS query cache with configurable size, and it supports prefetching — it can refresh cached entries before they expire. That means for frequently-visited domains, the response time is essentially zero. Pi-hole has caching too, but AdGuard Home's implementation is more sophisticated.
Does that actually matter in practice, or is this a spec sheet differentiator?
For a home network with a few users, the difference is imperceptible — we're talking single-digit milliseconds either way. But if you're running it for a larger network, or if you're on a slow upstream connection, the prefetching can make browsing feel snappier because popular domains are always fresh in the cache.
For Daniel's use case, not a deciding factor. But good to know.
Not a deciding factor. The deciding factors are the interface, the encrypted DNS support, and the query log.
Let's address the psychological dimension Daniel raised — that moment when you look at the dashboard and realize how much tracking is happening. Is there a risk that seeing those numbers makes people paranoid in an unproductive way?
I think there's a risk of overcorrection, yes. You see that forty percent of your DNS queries are blocked, and you think "I need to block more." But some of those blocked domains might be things you actually want — CDNs that speed up websites, analytics that help sites you care about stay in business. The goal isn't to maximize the blocked percentage. The goal is to block the creepy stuff without breaking the things you value.
That's a healthy framing. It's not a score to maximize.
And Daniel seems to understand this intuitively — he's asking for a "basic posture," not a maximalist one. He wants to block tracking pixels and spammy ads, not disappear from the internet entirely.
What about the future of this space? We're seeing more tracking move to first-party domains, more encrypted DNS adoption, more IoT devices with hardcoded settings. Is network-level DNS filtering going to become less effective over time?
It's going to become less sufficient on its own, but it won't become less valuable. The tracking industry will keep adapting — they always do. First-party tracking, server-side analytics, fingerprinting — these are beyond the reach of DNS filtering. But DNS filtering still stops the third-party tracking infrastructure that the majority of sites use today. And for IoT devices, it's the only realistic protection most people have. So I think it remains an essential layer, even if it's not the only layer.
The tools will evolve too. AdGuard Home already supports blocking by client, by time of day, by query type. I imagine we'll see more sophisticated filtering logic over time.
We're already seeing it. AdGuard Home has a feature called "safe search" that forces search engines to use their safe search mode by rewriting DNS queries. It has parental control features that block adult content categories. It can block specific services — like blocking all social media during homework hours. The tool is growing beyond simple domain blocking into more nuanced filtering.
Which is powerful but also adds complexity. For Daniel's "basic posture," I'd say ignore all that and just use the core blocking features with one moderate list.
Add complexity only when you have a specific problem you're trying to solve.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The national animal of Scotland is the unicorn. It has been since the twelfth century, when it was used on the Scottish royal coat of arms. Scotland is one of the only countries whose national animal is entirely mythical.
...right.
To wrap this up — Daniel, if you're listening, the short answer is AdGuard Home with one moderate blocklist, encrypted upstream DNS, and per-client rules for work devices. Run it alongside OPNsense, either on the firewall itself or on a separate device. Start simple, let the allowlist build naturally, and resist the urge to stack blocklists. The internet will be faster, your tracking pixel blood pressure will drop, and your household won't revolt.
If you do run into something breaking, the query log is your friend. It tells you exactly what got blocked and lets you fix it with one click. That's the difference between a tool you resent and a tool you trust.
One open question I'll leave you with: as tracking moves to first-party domains and server-side analytics, what's the next layer of defense? Browser-level tools are part of the answer, but I wonder if we'll see something new emerge at the network level — maybe DNS filtering that can distinguish between first-party content and first-party tracking based on behavioral patterns. Something to watch.
That's a fascinating direction. DNS over HTTPS also complicates network-level filtering because it's harder to inspect. The arms race continues.
Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping this show running. This has been My Weird Prompts. Find us at myweirdprompts dot com or on Spotify. We'll be back soon.
