[VerifiedReports]

I don't understand this fairly sparse "article."

"Plex added a paid license for remote streaming, a feature that was previously free. And then Plex decided to also sell personal data — I sure love self-hosted software spying on me."

How is it "self-hosted" if it's "remote streaming?" And if you're hosting it, you can throttle any outgoing traffic you want. Right?

The only other examples are Mattermost and MinIO... which I don't know much about, but again: Aren't you in control of your own host?

This article is lame. How about focusing on back-ends that pretend to support self-hosting but make it difficult by perpetuating massive gaps in its documentation (looking at you, Supabase)?

[hsjdndvvbv]

> How is it "self-hosted" if it's "remote streaming?" And if you're hosting it, you can throttle any outgoing traffic you want. Right?

You host the plex service with your media library. Plex allows you to stream without opening up your firewall to others. Not sure now it works exactly because I never hosted it myself.

[doix]

> Plex allows you to stream without opening up your firewall to others.

It relies on their hosted services/infrastructure. I avoid Plex for that reason. I just host my media with nginx + indexing enabled. Wireguard for creating the tunnel between the server-client and Kodi as the frontend to view the media (you can add an indexed http server as a media source).

Works great, no transcoding like Plex, but that's less of an issue nowadays when hardware accelerated decoders are common for h264 & h265.

[mbirth]

> It relies on their hosted services/infrastructure.

Only if you want it to. Your local Plex server is always available on port 32400 - which can be opened up for others as well. But using Plex’s authentication is more convenient, of course.

[doix]

Yeah, I was specifically talking about the "firewall" bypassing the parent mentioned (most likely combined with NAT punch-through as well). You could of course use Plex without that and use wireguard (or just make it available to the internet) and not rely on their infra.

[fooqux]

Do you have any recommendations for decoders? I've been using a fire stick for a bit but I wouldn't mind a better alternative.

[hsjdndvvbv]

Apple TV 4k is my goto. Has Ethernet, can run apps.

[VerifiedReports]

I use an Nvidia Shield for everything except Blu-Ray.

[VerifiedReports]

That's exactly my point: It runs on your computer, on your LAN, serving your media. How is it doing anything outside your control, then?

[spwa4]

For NAT bypass you need infrastructure with a real IP.

[hsjdndvvbv]

It talks to Plex servers to give outside access....

[VerifiedReports]

Thanks. I've only heard of people using it to stream stuff around their own house; didn't even know it exposed access remotely.

[adastra22]

Im confused. There are two different streaming things on Plex. They support streaming inside the plex app of content from the usual streaming services, much like Apple TV or your TV’s built in media manager. They also support streaming your collection across the internet to wherever you are. Which is now behind a paywall?

[blahlabs]

I don't use Plex anymore, but not long before I cancelled my account they starting charging to access someone's library that had been shared with you if the sharing party did not have Plex pass, or something to that effect.

[boltzmann-brain]

> This article is lame. How about focusing on back-ends that pretend to support self-hosting but make it difficult by perpetuating massive gaps in its documentation (looking at you, Supabase)?

that's one way of enshittifying, but what the article talks about is nonetheless very important.

People rely on projects being open source (or rather: _hosted on github_) as some sort of mark of freedom from shitty features and burdensome monetization.

As the examples illustrate, the pattern of capturing users with a good offering and then subsequently squeezing them for money can very easily be done by open source software with free licenses. The reason for that is that source code being available is not, alone, enough to ensure not getting captured by adversarial interests.

What you ALSO need is people wanting to put in the work to create a parallel fork to continuously keep the enshittification at bay. Someone who rolls a distribution with a massive amount of ever-decaying patches, increasingly large amounts of workarounds, etc. Or, alternatively, a "final release" style fork that enters maintenance mode and only ever backports security vulnerability fixes. Either of those is a huge amount of work and it's not even sure that people will find that fork on their own rather than just assume "things are like that now".

Given that the code's originating corporation can and will eagerly throw whole teams of people at disabling such efforts, the counter-efforts would require the same amount of free labor to be successful - or even larger, given that it's easy to wreck things for the code's originator but it's difficult to fix them for the restoration crew.

This pattern, repeated in many projects over the decades since GPL2 and MIT were produced, displays that merely being free and open source does not create a complete anti enshittification measure for the end user. What is actually necessary is a societal measure, a safety web made up of developers dedicated to conservation of important software, who would be capable of correcting any stupid decisions made by pointy-haired managers. There are some small projects like this (eg Apache, and many more) but they are not all-encompassing and many projects that are important to people are without such a safety net.

So for this reason, eg when people are upset that mattermost limits the messages to 10000, their real quarrel isn't really even with the scorpion, who is known to sting, it is with the lack of there being a social safety net for this particular software. Their efforts would be well spent on rapidly building such a safety network to quickly force the corporation's hand into increasingly more desperate measures, accelerating their endgame and self-induced implosion. Then, after the corpo's greed inevitably makes them eat themselves in full, the software can enter the normal space of FOSS development rather than forever remain this corporate slave-product that is pact-bound to a Delaware LLC by a chain of corporate greed.

Only once any free fork's competition backed by VCs burning their money on a ceremonial heap has been removed can the free version of the software become the central source for all users and therefore become successful, rather than continuously play catch up with a throng of H-2B holders.

[VerifiedReports]

I don't doubt the validity of those sentiments. I'm just perplexed (see what I did there) as to what the specific issue is in this case because I thought Plex was for streaming stuff from one side of your house to the other (and/or playing it back).

[boltzmann-brain]

not necessarily, you can also have a plex server at home and as a student have a laptop in your dorm or at school and watch stuff there. or on the move when you're using a mobile phone, etc.