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?

  • German The Jackal@pawb.socialEnglish
    102·
    6 hours ago

    Please don’t try to gatekeep software or turn selfhosting into a Professional Redditor Larper shitwar like iOS vs Android. Literally no one needs or wants that.

    You can criticise Plex for its many shortcomings, that’s valid. Even better if you contribute to Jellyfin so it can overcome its shortcomings. But saying Plex is not self-hosted for puritan reasons is not a good look and smells like StackOverflow and elitist neckbeards; you’re disqualifying people from the community just because you, in your infinite pedantic wisdom, cannot comprehend that they also have valid reasons for using what they use.

    By this logic:

    • If you use the internet, nothing you access through it is self-hosted, because your ISP dictates if it’s allowed or not. Tailscale, WireGuard, OpenVPN, or a direct port connection are all subject to this. However you can access Jellyfin remotely is subject to this.
    • Docker isn’t self-hosted - you depend on Docker Inc, their image registry will be aware of some details about your host, including your IP, which is technically PII and is directly linked to you.
    • Let’s Encrypt certificates aren’t self-hosted because they’re an external CA and collect data like your email.
    • Jellyfin is not self-hosted, it depends on TMDB and OMDB which are commercial or external.
    • Pi-hole is not self-hosted as it depends in many cases on GitHub or external resources for its block lists, and it depends on public resolvers to operate.
    • Ubuntu is not self-hosted because Canonical controls everything and has telemetry
    • Neither is Windows, Mac, Debian, Arch, or even FreeBSD - they control updates and packages and if they randomly become evil, they have levers on you no matter what. Maybe TempleOS lol.
    • Nextcloud is not self-hosted because they control the add-on store, update servers and has telemetry.
    • The BitTorrent protocol isn’t self hosted because you rely on trackers and they collect telemetry about your client
    • Media piracy isn’t self-hosted because you’re relying on other people to produce it for you
    • If you get phone notifications, emails, messages, or whatever else - those aren’t self hosted. Even if you host Ntfy you’re still relying on Apple or Google notification relay servers.

    I could go on.

    By any stretch of this line of thinking, even the mere act of downloading any software in the first place disqualifies it from counting as self-hosted, because you didn’t build it from scratch and you depend on an external resource, your ISP, a DNS resolver, your operating system, your hardware (microcode, BIOS), your browser, and so on and so forth. The logic breaks down very fast. Don’t.