Does AdNauseam still make sense when using Pi-hole with ~4M blocked domains?

[megvadulthangya]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been using Pi-hole as my DNS resolver, with around 4 million domains blocked. It already filters out the majority of ad and tracking requests before they even reach the browser.

My question is: does it still make sense to use AdNauseam in this setup?
Since most ad domains never load, I’m wondering if AdNauseam’s obfuscation and “clicking” features can still function effectively — or if its benefits are mostly lost when Pi-hole blocks so much upstream.

Has anyone tested or compared AdNauseam’s impact when combined with a heavily configured Pi-hole?

Thanks in advance for your insights!

[Opening-Button-8988]

Disclaimer, I've never used Pi-hole, and I'm still new to Adnauseam. Also I myself am still weighing up the pros and cons of Adnauseam.

I think it's not worth doing both. I think this is one of those cases where you can't have your cake and eat it too. Blocking domains will inevitably lead to preventing Adnauseam from getting access to those domains and doing its thing. You need to pick a lane, and Adnauseam's approach is fundamentally in opposition to a standard block approach.

Which lane you should pick is still up for debate, and I do think the jury is out on whether Adnauseam actually benefits you or for how long. I know there's a lot of technical nuance to this, but there is a similarity with Adnauseam and something like fawkes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fawkes_(software)). I read a paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.14851) about how data poisoning can't beat facial recognition. I wonder if this principle applies to Adnauseam. But to answer your question, you can't poison the data if you don't have access to it, so again, you must choose. The only exception would be if it is revealed, somehow, that there are some ads (or ad networks) worse than others, and that your attempts at poisoning them would be futile. I'm unfamiliar with any blocklists that are catered for this kind of thing, nor any research discriminating between the two. The closest thing to this would be Do Not Track (Adnauseam's setting - don't hide tracking ads).

[megvadulthangya]

thanks for explaining

[crazy-dmd]

Just as a note I use NextDNS and have a bunch of Block lists enabled for it. Using AAdNauseam with it seems like it does work for some ads. uBlock still works for blocking ads as well; block list are never really 100% Regardless. Even though I have to use Microsoft Edge because Chrome seems to be trying to block any extension which messes with their ad revenue.