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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[–] thumdinger@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

This. I’ve had a couple of situations where we had an ISP outage and for whatever reason Plex Auth had expired and needed to connect to their servers to regain access to local media. The first time it happened I was pissed off. The second time it happened I installed Jellyfin and never looked back.

[–] remon@ani.social 3 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

You can white list local IP address if you want them to work without auth. Just a config issue in your end.

[–] thumdinger@lemmy.world 1 points 15 hours ago

This was for the server itself requiring re-authentication with Plex for the server claim token, rather than client auth. Some situation arose where the claim token was no longer valid, expired, unsure, and the server was locked out and local media inaccessible until ISP outage resolved and could login with Plex account (2 weeks due to fallen tree). Not ruling out a config issue. Was a couple of years ago now, so bit fuzzy on the details.

[–] W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Jellyfin. Jellyfin. JELLYFIN. install it now? Is it the right fit? Fuck you who cares. I loaded Jellyfin and it worked for me so if it doesn’t work for you then you’re wrong!

Jellyfin!

Forget Emby or Kodi. JELLYFIN JELLYFINJELLUFIN!!!!!!

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 9 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Despite the downvotes this does seem pretty accurate for this community lately.

[–] W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Yep, which is why I’m doing it. I tried reasonable debate but that didn’t work sooo……

[–] remon@ani.social 3 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

thank you for not using /s and just taking the downvotes like champ!

[–] W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

I mean, at the end of the day the imaginary points aren’t good for anything. Thanks for the comment (seriously).