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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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[–] mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 month ago

Exactly this. Jellyfin shouldn’t be available externally (even with a reverse proxy!) which means a personal VPN is your only realistic option for remote access. But that means you can only remotely access it on devices that can run a VPN. So grandma’s smart TV is probably disqualified.

Plex makes remote sharing much easier, so it’s what I use for friends and family. I got the lifetime pass like a decade ago, and I have gotten my money’s worth out of it a hundred times over. Luckily, Plex and Jellyfin will happily exist side-by-side, so there’s no real reason for me to choose one or the other.