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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

when you are hosting something that is entirely dependent on a commercial entity to function

Eh, you can still get in with them down by hitting the local server, so I don't think this is entirely accurate.

Would I recommend it? No, I have a lifetime pass since the early days of it being offered and I just use JF. I recommend Jellyfin.

But I'm also not going to look down on folks who dont want to deal with auth or are unsure when it comes to opening a port on a firewall, access is something Plex makes easy and I get that.

So is it self-hosting? If they are running the server, no matter if its local, a vps, whatever, then I'd say yes. Whether or not it meets with my personal ideals are irrelevant.

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