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Is Plex really Self Hosting? (piefed.zip)

submitted 1 month ago by CallMeAl@piefed.zip to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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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?

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[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 33 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I don't think there are any hard and fast rules for what is self hosting. Lots of people use cloudflare, which would fail both of your criteria as well.

At least with Plex/cloudflare/others, your overall control and privacy is better and more in your control than it would be with other non-self hosted alternatives.

[–] CallMeAl@piefed.zip 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I specifically asked about the criteria from this community's own sidebar because that's what I'm interested, what is self hosting "in the spirit of this community?"

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like your reply ignores my actual question for discussion.

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 7 points 1 month ago

The description of this community is not a hard rule written in stone, and I would treat it as more of a vibe than a criteria.

If you want to take it literally, then yes, Plex doesn't count, neither does cloudflare or wordpress. Any many other proprietary systems commonly used by the self hosting community.

But I think the spirit of this community is a bit more loose, and there is room for the likes of Plex.

[–] artyom@piefed.social 0 points 1 month ago

Plex specifically is the worst of both though. You have to host all of your own data, and pay Plex for the privilege, but they maintain control of virtually everything you can do with it.