this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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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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[–] False@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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.