Do you know what ORACLE stands for?

+1 for PBS streaming. It's a great value and highly underrated.

You do have the file on a device... On a server, and you can play it on any client you like

There's nothing wrong with that, but self hosting opens up so much more flexibility, much like cloud hosted services we're used to. Jellyfin is like a personal Netflix where you can watch your movies on any device at any time. The convenience is obvious. For most cloud hosted services, there's an alternative that can be self hosted, and then you actually own your shit.

Self-hosting allows you to have all your files on all your devices, like many have used to with the streaming services. Also, some smart TVs specifically require to connect to some server to grab movies from.

If you don't need any of that, regular hard drive will suit you best.

For me, it's a matter of restoring the convenience and UX that you've given up by leaving the big providers.

Mainly just multi-device access.

Webrips. That’s how we get movies and shows today without waiting for physical media being released

Yeah, piracy is the last bastion of privately controlled media files

Doesn't seem like it's going away though

If the high seas dries up, are we up shit creek and have to stream?

Actually support people who distribute under more reasonable terms/use Creative Commons/release to public domain.

If the high seas dry up, we shall sail the skies or the void itself.

Adapt, improvise, overcome.

If the high seas dry up I'll just hit my local public library and get all the books and other media from there

The thrift store?

Rookie.

Edit: You gotta pump up those numbers.

Imagine not having a double digit bay NAS with triple digit Tebibytes of space.

Hopefully it's all U2 nvme drives and not ancient sata drives. Those are for either dinosaurs or shudders poor people

Alternatively, your setup is kinda slow and you're kinda lazy (not used pejoratively).

The expenses are mostly upfront though. I've spent like $400 on a relatively fancy NAS and two 3TB WD Red CMR drives five years ago, and since then, there was that.

Of course, depending on your use case, there could be extra expenses as well, some of them recurring:

• Bigger drives
• Backup storage (I already had a place I could back up to)
• Domain name and DNS records (if you expose it to the public Web with a URL; you can otherwise just use a VPN tunnel to access NAS from outside the home network, which is free unless you do anything fancy)
• Some kind of paid software (if you don't enjoy the perfectly good collection of open-source apps)
• Etc.

Now, for the streaming alternative:

• Netflix Standard: $18/mo
• Spotify: $12/mo
• Total: $30/mo, or $360/yr. Just these two services alone.

Your NAS system will pay off in a little over a year (maybe two years if you go all in with huge drives, fancy NAS configs, extra expenses here and there), and it's smooth sailing from there.

My unit works for 5 years already with no maintenance, is still fully supported by the manufacturer, and I don't expect to replace it in a few more years.

that's self-hosted.

Self hosting essentially stores all of your data on your hard drive, but it also allows access to that via local network (while at home) and over internet via secured tunnel (e.g. Wireguard tunnel, Tailscale) while away from home.

Self-hosting is saving to a hard drive. The difference is how it's accessed. If you save it to a (presumably portable?) hard drive, you can only access it from the hard drive. "Self-hosting" allows it to be stored on a hard drive, inside a server, which is then accessible from anywhere, on any device, at any time.

There was a time when I had an old desktop packed full of spinning hard drives in my living room under a CRT television! Yes that works, but a NAS in the furnace room that is accessible from "smart TVs" and everyone's mobile devices is pretty nice. No more fan noise either.

In what way? You don't own anything on the fediverse. The people who run the various instances do.

Maybe they even have a TOS that says you own it, but then what? its still up to them to continue to host it, and they have no contract with you.

Unless you are self hosting your own instance, and only count what is on that, you own no more than with larger social media sites.

To be clear, I think that federations certainly are better than monolithic sources for a variety of reasons for real people, but they aren't a solution for ownership.

disagree. legally a government can forcefully take down a community but it's far more difficult to police a physical ring of pirates.

pirating in the late 90s early 2000s was mostly done through physical interaction. you could download content from places like Napster, limewire, etc, but the volume of which content spread the fastest was at LAN parties.

I filled up a brand new 250gb drive after one LAN party in 2002. I still have all that content 23 years later.

point is, if we could harness the power of a "trust" content sharing would run rampant.

You're going to "own" digital content through...federation? How does that work?