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Is Plex really Self Hosting? (piefed.zip)
submitted 5 months ago by 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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[–] 4 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

Self hosting is as simple as hosting a service yourself on your own hardware and not relying on 3rd party servers. With that, Plex is partly self hosted, as you host part of it. But as a whole it is not a fully self hosted service. Discussing Plex in a self host group makes sense as part of it is hosted on your own hardware. Technically using a vps isn't really self hosting, but if somebody sticks a service like immich or nextcloud onto a VPS to remove their reliance on Google, I still think posting in a self host group to discuss it is the best option.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    It still is self hosting, if you don't count media scraping as cheating.

    You don't need plexpass. In fact, I really should start installing the free version again because I use an always on vpn now instead of relying on their proxies. But at that point I'd just use jellyfin instead.

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