I ordered a Raspberry Pi 5 so I have a Pi 3 that’s about to be redundant. I haven’t used Pi-Hole so I was thinking it’d be good for that but I’m curious if there’s any downsides for users. Are sites blocked if you dont whitelist them? That sort of thing.
Basically, I’m not worried about me having issues but I’m worried about a maintenance headache if friends and family can’t access things.
Yes, but first go check which list you want to use since they’re a good starting point to understand a kind of level of tolerance and expectations around your experience.
There’s lots of lists around here’s a small sample:
https://arstech.net/pi-hole-blocking-lists-2023/
Be prepared for a bump in time outs as you work through things you might need (I blocked by accident a bunch of needed Microsoft services that I need to use during my job).
I haven’t edited my white list in months, maybe over a year. It’s going very well. I’ve been running pihole on ubuntu for more than 5 years as two virtual machines. I’m happy.