Technology

One reason: It's not FOSS, and because of that, it's not protected from the Capitalist profit motive that's always pushing the creators/owners towards enshitification.

The same forces act upon FOSS too, but the difference is that FOSS has structural immunity built into it. If the software enshitifies, it can be forked and maintained by a community that values software freedom.

We've seen it happen time and again. Terraform, CentOS, RHEL, The Xen Hypervisor, etc. When companies try to take freedom away from FOSS, they fail, because their users and maintainers are empowered by FOSS licenses (especially restrictive ones like the GPL) and can fight back.

With proprietary software, the users are powerless, only the owners have control.

Don't trust promises, good intentions, or corporate slogans. Trust free software and the open ecosystems they thrive in.

PS, Jellyfin is amazing ❤️

I'm going to call it like I saw it, a very long time ago.

You have a product that is basically purpose built to make data hoarding and piracy practical, yet it requires a login with a central service. I don't care what justification anyone thinks makes that worthwhile or even a good compromise. Signaling to any corporate entity that you're in possession of such a thing is a bad idea to begin with. They shouldn't even know you exist. That information, along with anything else you do with the product is compromising to you and can be sold for money if aggregated with everyone else's data.

If you find this rant out of place in our modern world, I'd like to point to the concept of shifting baselines. This didn't used to be normal and nothing short of greed continues the behavior. The technology before this ran/runs without anyone knowing. Consider VLC, or XBMC.

I never felt comfortable with Plex, glad I've got JellyFin.

1. It's a commercial product, what else could you expect?

I hate headlines like this. I’d love to hear the REASONS WHY Plex are doing all of this. But no, it’s just “4 ways in which Plex now sucks” which we all know already.

Before someone says “the reason is money” we need to ask: do the developers of Jellyfin not use money? Why won’t the same thing just happen to them too?

Before someone says “enshittification,” we need to ask: does this mean Jellyfin will soon have the same problems?

We all seem to love Jellyfin so I think we need to understand the actual reason why, or this will just continue happening.

If they were going to get enshittified, they should've been smarter about it to gradually introduce lock-in. The switching cost of going to Jellyfin is almost zero. Did it in an afternoon about a year ago. Ya done goofed, Plex

Meh, I went into plex settings on the server and just turned off all the bloat. Its all on one page. Not a big deal.

Plex has been off limits to me for along time. Just the fact they want to require auth with their central service for something I use for reasons rights holders would love to sue me into third world poverty over (muh Linux ISOs) is enough reason.

Them demanding that auth hook into the server makes me uneasy about what sort of metatdata they are currently, or could exfiltrate later on, should they want to or be demanded to.

Whole thing stinks of willingly being part of a honeypot.

Goodness, how am I supposed to store and stream more entertainment than I could watch in a lifetime now?

Clients suck on non plex

The thing it replaced... XBMC? O_o