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?

          • SaltySalamander@fedia.io
            01·
            6 months ago

            Naturally, I told them to go fuck themselves and installed Jellyfin. And donated 10x what a ‘Plex Pass’ would have cost to the guy that made the Samsung-Tizen-Jellyfin-Installer thingummy. Because, well, fuck Plex.

            And then they all clapped.

            • _g_be@lemmy.worldEnglish
              01·
              6 months ago

              The difference between “this is true” and “this was true ten years ago” is huge.

              Presenting one as the other is why you’re being challenged

        • TechSquidTV@lemmy.worldEnglish
          02·
          5 months ago

          It has not changed. Your experience is, you didn’t read the docs, made an assumption, and have been incorrect ever since. Idc if you call it a lie or not, but you know now. If you continue to spread this misinformation, it is absolutely a lie.

  • False@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    Just as much as Tailscale is self hosting. Tailscale is probably more concerning from a security point of view.

    • JigglypuffSeenFromAbove@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      What exactly is concerning about Tailscale’s security?

      I’m new to self-hosting and Tailscale was the easiest/fastest way I could get to access my stuff externally. I’m currently learning about the alternatives.

      • False@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        I’m not concerned about it personally, but you are putting a lot of trust in them as a 3rd party service provider. It’s up to your specific risk profile if that’s acceptable risk or not.

        The alternative would probably be self hosting a vpn yourself with dyndns to handle ip address resolution. I’m biased (I have a professional networking background) but I don’t think it’s that much harder to setup either. But then I’m also a hypocrite and don’t self host anything anymore.

        There’s also a valid argument to be made that doing it yourself is riskier because novices make mistakes. I don’t think this is too big of a concern personally - it’s not like you’re rolling your own cryptography.