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Is Plex really Self Hosting? (piefed.zip)
submitted 4 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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[–] 1 point 4 months ago* (2 children)

Well, grammatical quibble then.

Your verbs are present tense and not past tense:

Plex requires a Plex Pass subscription

Plex doesn’t allow you to watch media on your local network

This gives the impression that you're talking about the current state of things. Which seems to be the above commenter's issue.

Where as:

Plex required a Plex Pass subscription

or

Plex didn't allow you to watch media on your local network

Would imply a past experience.

Misinformation doesn't mean that you're intentionally lying (that is disinformation), it just means that you're stating facts that are not true.

(I'm not being negative, just pedantic lol)

To actually contribute to the conversation:

Plex now allows local network streaming without their servers being offline as long as your client is already authenticated (cached tokens have a short expiration date however)

Alternatively, you can add your LAN's subnet in Settings > Server > Network > 'List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth'

Here's a full written guide: https://forums.plex.tv/t/howto-use-plex-with-no-internet/383325

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  • [+] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)
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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    I understood the misunderstanding from reading the previous comments.

    I was clear in other comments that I was speaking of what I knew to be true at the time, therefore the tense was correct from my perspective.

    I didn't say you were intentionally lying, only that you were mistaken. I wasn't making a personal attack.

    I acknowledge that based on your experience that is how Plex worked 10 years ago, but it is not how it currently works. So, when you say that 'this is how Plex works' instead of 'this is how Plex worked 10 years ago' it's implying that it still works like that when it does not. That could confuse people who are here and trying to learn.

    This place takes itself way, way too seriously, in my opinion. I’m sorry for any toes I stepped on without even meaning to, and I won’t comment on the matter further.

    The community exists to talk about, and help people with, self hosting. Providing incorrect information runs counter to that purpose and so community members should point out when information isn't correct.

    Misinformation just means that the information that you're providing is not correct, it's not a personal attack on you to be corrected about a factual issue. It doesn't mean that you're a bad person or suggest that you're trying to be intentionally misleading, it just means that your statements do not match the current factual reality.

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