I’ve been thinking about this more and more. According to the sidebar, this community is “A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.” Based on that I don’t think Plex qualifies.
Privacy: Plex clearly records the metadata of what you watch. When I used it, it would send me a report by email of what my “friends” were watching. Even with that turned off, their services still track telemetry.
Control: Plex has all of it. They can (and do) make unilateral changes to the service, how authentication works, where you can run it, etc.
So I ask, when you are hosting something that is entirely dependent on a commercial entity to function, is Plex really selfhosting in the spirit of this community?
Do you really feel attacked by this post?
Attacked? No this post alone doesn’t make me feel attacked.
Though it’s about weekly that we see a post saying essentially “there’s no reason anyone should still be using Plex…”, or “jellyfin is superior to plex because of x and y”. And honestly, it’s tiring and it feels forced. Like if jellyfin were so perfect, would it really need this many posts propping it up?
Anyway, what bugged me about this post was the level of smugness. “Does Plex even count as self hosting?”, “is this really in the spirit of the community?”… God damn, that sounds like the least bearable person in the homeowners association.