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?
No, Plex is not self-hosting. Once they tried to get me to purchase a Plex Pass for remote access, I knew I needed something else that didn’t have a paywall.
That said, many people find their way to better services like Jellyfin by first using Plex and coming to this same conclusion, so I am not going to write off the Plex people yet. They will figure it out one day 🙂
Instead of plexpass you could do always on VPN with wire guard.
You’re right, but my low-tech family and friends will not be able to figure that out. lol
Definitely. Those folks for me are definitely using regular Plex to access my server.
Just because you have a poor understanding of what “self-hosting” is, doesn’t make a Plex server running on your own hardware NOT self-hosting.