this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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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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[–] HeartyOfGlass@piefed.social 54 points 1 day ago (1 children)

... well, at some point any hobby grows to the point where purists show up.

There's give and take with everything. Is it "self" hosted if you rely on Docker - a 3rd party with control over their own infrastructure? Or hosting it on a Debian OS? Is it really "private" if it's connected to the internet at all?

Are you running the Plex Server application on some hardware so other devices can access the library? Hey, that's self-hosting. That's it.

[–] czl@lemmy.dbzer0.com 43 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I guess I’m not selfhosting at all, I use a power grid that I don’t control.

[–] mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

It’s not truly self hosting unless you start by creating the universe.

Edit: Balls, @gedfromgont@piefed.ca beat me to it. That’ll teach me to riff on Sagan quotes before I scroll down in the thread.

[–] gedfromgont@piefed.ca 27 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Have you mined the minerals though?

Or to put it in another way "to truly selfhost you need to start by creating the universe".