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by horacemorace 850 days ago
This is the reason I roll my eyes when millennials talk about setting up “their plex” or “their discord”. It’s not your sandcastle if someone else owns the sandbox.
7 comments

The youngest millenial is about 27. So replace "millenial" with gen-z or gen alpha, but really I would just delete the first sentence you have there. You can make an opinionated statement without arbitrarily dragging a cohort of people.
Many “millennials” are over 40 now.
Well, some of us are...
It's profoundly annoying how people flock to these "easy" corporate owned services instead of doing it right the first time around. Network effects make it very hard to get out later and they also make it so others have to get with the program if they want to participate.
Sure, but it's also profoundly annoying to spend your workday deploying and maintaining services, then come home and have to do the same.

I ran Jellyfin some years back, when I was evaluating Plex/Emby/Jellyfin after switching from Kodi, and I probably spent a week or more chasing random issues and crashes. So I put it on the shelf and picked Plex since it was nearly 0 effort and it made the family happy given how easy it was to use (and didn't crash).

Of course people want something that's easy to set up and use. A lot of people want a tool, not a new hobby. And the best way to accomplish that is unfortunately to optimize for ease of setup and stability instead of new features. But that can be hard for an open-source project when everyone is asking for the new thing a for-profit company added to their product.

What is the "right" way to access your media library from anywhere and share it with anyone?
Any way that lets you maintain control.
I’d roll my eyes at any grumpy old language pedant that thinks that that I don’t understand how computers works. I’m the lower edge of millennial and I’ve been working as a software developer for ten years. Move on.
Discord is the craziest one imo. You have zero control and that has not yet worked out once anywhere on the internet but ok, here we go again.
I always feel a little dirty when I have to go on a discord to find some information.
Eh, there's a big difference; "their Plex" is software they download which uses their hardware and data they control to provide a service. There are alternatives (jellyfin) which allows a person to get the same functionality using their same hardware and the same data they control.

Discord though you're very right about, discord is more MSN messenger than it is IRC.