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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[–] 12 points 4 months ago*

It's not just about watching content, but also about having it neatly organised with your watch history tracked in a easy to use interface. And on top of that, making it easily accessible to friends/family with minimum effort.

open source to me means open source, not open/paywall/ source.

It sure means that, but not quite sure why this is relevant. There is obviously a big overlap between self-hosters and foss enthusiast on lemmy, but for me they are unrelated.

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