I've been running NextDNS on my main phone for a few days now after someone posted about it on Mastodon. I was slightly shocked to see thousands of blocked DNS queries for ad networks. I knew there'd be some of course but it's 1/3 of the queries! This has convinced me I'm not okay with ignoring it, even when idle my phone is calling back to Google ad endpoints (you can see the blocked entries increment even when you havn't touched your phone). NextDNS is a great product, but I don't know how much they can be trusted (and their own website has Google Analytics):
I've been impressed with Linode, I use it for oppen.dev to host my Gitea instance. Linode is much cheaper than my other VPS at FastHosts and I hope to move this domain there too at some point. So I've been thinking of setting up a Linode OpenVPN or WireGuard instance and configuring that to block ad network DNS queries.
OpenVPN with Pi-Hole can be configured so only DNS queries are routed:
WireGuard alternative:
Remote accessing Pi-Hole using WireGuard
More to come when I find the time to give it a try.