I tried pi-hole but my family couldn't make it work. Pihole blocks a lot of content they want to see, for example, email newsletters from our city gov. I understand why (privacy/tracking concerns) but it was just blocking too much and frustrating non-technical users in my house.

A lot of these list maintainers put a lot of work into not breaking things, but their are just too many websites out their to know if a block breaks one of them or not. Send the list maintainer an email - or if they are on Github/Gitlab open a ticket and have a discussion. I think you'll find many of them are happy to remove breaking domains. Of course whitelist is always an option too if the list maintainer disagrees with the removal of a domain.

Also, there is a popular whitelist project for the Pi-Hole that can make it more user friendly: https://github.com/anudeepND/whitelist

I spoke directly with the pihole maintainers. They took a Hardline position that them blocking email from my city was the right thing to do because it used click tracking or some other metric gathering and was deemed a privacy risk.

I understand the devotion to a cause but it was too myopic for me.

As far as I know, the pi-hole maintainers do not maintain any of the default block lists. I maintain a list [1] that is then feed into the popular host list by Steven Black [2] - which is a default list.

I definitely do not want to break things for people and I'm happy to remove any reasonable domains from the list. I wouldn't consider google analytics a reasonable one to remove - but you get the idea. I hate to hear you had a bad experience of it. If my list had the breaking domains for you, I would of loved to have a ticket opened where we could discuss it. Sometimes it isn't clear cut between ads & tracking and useful services.

[1] https://github.com/lightswitch05/hosts

[2] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts