This is an old revision of the document!
Table of Contents
Home Networking
This section describes several topics of interest that may be of use to someone who wants to avoid/mitigate the forces of tech enshittification, specifically when at home or a place where you have a certain amount of control over your internet connection (e.g. not while out and about using your mobile phone)
Custom DNS
To start off with some context, this article does a great job concisely explaining what DNS is. Now that you know what DNS is used for, why would we want to customize it? This section outlines some of the main anti-enshittification reasons someone might have for custom DNS.
Ad Blocking
No one who has ever seen a browsing experience or a mobile app with blocked ads has ever insisted on going back to the experience with ads. Blocking ads is a no-brainer not only from a user experience perspective, but also from a consumer tracking perspective (assuming as a user you are irritated by ads and have at least a somewhat negative reaction to the idea of having consumer data collected about you by a large number of private companies that are unknown to you.
Wikipedia's ad blocking article does a great job explaining the current landscape of ad blocking. In the context of this article, one of the most popular and effective ways to block ads is through a custom source of DNS as opposed to the default DNS server that is typically provided by your ISP (Internet Service Provider).
If individuals can exert direct control over DNS (which is essentially a massive list of all the human-readable addresses on the internet, such as “google.com”), then control can also be exerted over the destination that these names point to. In effect, if we want to continue visiting wikipedia.org, we can continue redirecting traffic to that named address to the real, actual destination of wikipedia.org. On the other hand, if we want to thwart or “block” traffic to a given known ad site (“mycrappyads.com”, for example here), we can direct our DNS to redirect any request to mycrappyads.com will be redirected to nothing. Technically the address is reachable and responds, but it responds with nothing, instead of serving the content that would be returned by whatever the real mycrappyads.com would respond with.
The problem (and solution) here to massive lists of known domains that serve advertisements is the maintenance of large, frequently-updated lists of “baddies”. What constitutes a “baddie” is of course subjective. This same paradigm of controlling one's own DNS can also of course be applied to other classifications of content, including for instance parental control of content that might be unsavory for youths.
Common Tools
There are several recommended common tools to choose from to block ads/control web content:
- DNS-based tools
- Non-DNS based tools - these are browser extensions that can be used for more detectable by websites (e.g. websites will prevent use unless the ad-blocker is disabled)