I think now is a great time to remind everyone, like sync’s developer, Lemmy’s developers need to be paid too! The amount of time all the devs put into making lemmy exist, in my opinion, should be worth some of your money. If you can afford it, donating to the people who develop lemmy and/or the people keeping your home instance up will accelerate the incredible growth of lemmy!
I run all my traffic through a slightly anonymizing VPN service that also blocks ads. Turns out the ads here are also blocked 🥳
Same. I have a PiHole on my home network and it blocks the ads in Sync. I still see the empty box where the ad would be though. If I am out of the house the only way I can get that ad blocking back is by connecting to my home VPN server.
In my experience, AdGuard has a more useful (free for home use) server that mirrors the pihole service. It’s more customizable, and this bit is probably the key here, and you can have different rules for different devices/network numbers