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?

  • wr2623@midwest.socialEnglish
    1·
    21 hours ago

    Well that would be the description of the community, but the actual rules section doesn’t say anything about privacy/control.

    So at the end of the day Plex is self hosted (you run most of it) so it should qualify. It might not 100% match the spirit of self hosting it does still meet the definition.

    You can argue most Jellyfin/emby installs have the same problem because most users are still are dependent on external services because of things like metadata plugins.

    And on the privacy front those plugins aren’t any better than Plex. For instance The Movie DB which is the primary movie and TV metadata provider for Jellyfin has a privacy policy that clearly says they will use and share any interaction you have with the site including location and personal information. They almost certainly keep track of what is in your library. They don’t have a user account for you that they can use to track across IPs, but if your ISP keeps you on the same IP for long periods of time they have a good idea of what you are watching.

    You can run Jellyfin without those plugins enabled but unless you want to build/collect manual nfo files to import that data you are going to have a subpar experience.

    Same problem for the **arr stack since they need metadata as well. Some of which go to different providers so you are giving out that information to additional parties (i.e. Sonarr goes to TheTVDB which has a similar privacy policy).

    You can configure the arrs to write out nfo metadata and have Jellyfin consume that so that at least you aren’t giving away your info to two external parties.