PiHole is fine, I guess. I'm not a huge fan of it personally because:

  - It's local network only, and while I can VPN home, I don't always want to
  - It has a high maintenance overhead, at least for me. It would block too much, then my wife would complain, and I'd have to spend time figuring out the magic rule that was breaking.
  - It's DNS-level blocking only, which is helpful but doesn't cover nearly as much ground as just uBlock can. 
  - The DNS server has annoying preconfigured caching rules, that, while I can work around, it was just more effort for something I don't want to put more effort into.  

> But how is the internet economy supposed to function

If the existence of a given industry requires the annihilation of individual privacy and the elimination of free thought, then that industry does not deserve to exist. Kill the ad industry.

I too struggle with this. It's not like people can't publish things on the web without ads. If the author/artist wanted it to be free, the ads wouldn't be there. So people who use ad blockers are either making a moral choice to consume a paid service for free, or are ignorant of how the internet economy works.

There is an argument to be made that advertisements are so detrimental to the user experience and mental health of the recipient that they are morally justified in blocking them. However, that is debatable when you consider the alternative, which is that the medium you are consuming may not exist at all if not for the advertisements published along with it.

Most things worth doing on the internet are either A) paid for B) garner enough good will that they can be supported via some polite pan-handling or C) cheap enough to operate that it's a perfectly acceptable hobby expense for 1 person in your community.

Streaming services and E-commerce are the classic examples for A. Wikipedia is the quintessential example for B. C includes pretty much all the social outlets: Web forums, a Matrix server, private game servers (public game servers fall under A), blogs, etc.

Behavioral (invisible) analytics alone is the secret trillion dollar industry that online advertisers want to distract you from by focusing on the morality of ad blocking.

A good blocker should block many of those scripts too, but there's no stopping server-side analytics at scale.

Other types of micro transactions and payments are possible

I struggle with this too. I struggle less when I remind myself of how much the tech sector has grown in the past 20 years. Not even just in power and control over critical infrastructure, but in wealth.

                              Market Cap by Year
   Year       0                  1                2                3                  4
   2025   Nvidia (4.6T)    Apple (3.9T)      Google (3.8T)    Microsoft (3.5T)    Amazon (2.6T)
   2020   Apple (2.3T)     Microsoft (1.7T)  Amazon (1.6T)    Google (1.2T)       Meta (777M)
   2015   Apple (598M)     Google (534M)     Microsoft (440M) Berkshire (324M)    Exxon (325M)
   2010   Exxon (369M)     PetroChina (303M) Apple (296M)     BHP (244M)          Microsoft (239M) 

             Some Billionaires...
   Year       Musk    Page    Bezos   Ellison  Zuck  Buffett
   Current    714B    257B    251B    244B     227B   148B
   2024       195B    114B    194B    141B     177B   133B 
   2023       180B     79B    114B    107B      64B   106B
   2022       219B    111B    171B    106B      67B   118B
   2021       151B     92B    177B     93B      97B    96B
   2020        25B     51B    113B     59B      55B    68B
   2016        11B     35B     45B     44B      45B    61B
   - There are currently 19 people worth more than $100bn!
     - 4 of them are not American (Arnault, Ortega, Ambani, Helu)
     - 27 of the top 50 richest are non-Americans
     - 57 of the top 100 are non-Americans
   - Bill Gates was first worth $100bn in 1999, becoming the first centibillionaire

  > A lot of the abundance in software and technology we've seen in the past decade is possible only through this mechanism.

If times were good for the rest of us I honestly couldn't care less if Musk became a trillionaire. Good for him ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. But while wages are stagnant, while the job market is very competitive, we have major layoffs, while inflation is hitting average people hard, and while they keep pretending they can replace us all with AI; then hell fucking yeah I do care.

It ends up being a question about what is more right, than what is right. I'd feel more conflicted if we all, or the majority of us, were benefiting from the advancements. But sympathy is difficult when we look at those numbers.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...

https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/

P.S. here's a fun game for understanding how much a billion dollars is. It's difficult because that level of money generates so much interest.

Imagine you have a billion dollars. You put it in an investment account that earns 10% yearly interest, compounded daily. On day 1 you need funds, so sit on your ass and do nothing. After than, on each weekday you hire a new employee at the cost of $250k/yr and is also paid daily.

How many employees can you hire before you have less than a billion dollars?

There's a lot of variants you can run on this kind of thought experiment and I think they're helpful for understanding that level of wealth.

> If not, how do you think they should make money?

Figure it out or go bankrupt, for all I care. They're the ones who chose a business model directly adversarial to their users.

Plenty of games, mail and other services work without ads already, I'm sure if we're one day lucky enough to see Google go belly up someone will fill that hole as well.

How reliable are cronjobs in termux?

Does they get killed if you're low on memory?

Perhaps you could share these scripts somewhere? I'm sure other people would find inspiration from them.

Personally I use Nextcloud for all my phone and computer backups, it's working well for me.