I just realized I'm taking my ad-free experience in Lemmy for granted. It's refreshing to have a little corner of the internet that doesn't slam you with advertising.
The start of ads seems to always lead to a path of enshitification. One of the reasons I really like jellyfin is because they realized this and intentionally disabled recurrent donations. They saw what it does to Plex and saw the eventually the leadership's will try to sell out and sell the company or IPO.
Jellyfin saw the way every service seemed to go once the revenue picked up and decided they want to prevent that.
For those who don’t know: DNS blockers can be sketchy unless you’re hosting it yourself. Something like a pihole that you set up would be fine, but external DNS services are almost guaranteed to be data-mining you even worse than the ads and trackers they’re blocking.
It’s a little like free VPNs. The reputable ones cost money, because if you’re not the customer then you’re the product.