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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.

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110

Is Plex really Self Hosting? (piefed.zip)

submitted 20 hours ago by CallMeAl@piefed.zip to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

128 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

(page 3) 29 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz 3 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 9 minutes ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
DNS	Domain Name Service/System
Git	Popular version control system, primarily for code
HTTP	Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
HTTPS	HTTP over SSL
IP	Internet Protocol
ISP	Internet Service Provider
Plex	Brand of media server package
SSL	Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
VPN	Virtual Private Network
VPS	Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

[Thread #317 for this comm, first seen 26th May 2026, 11:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 0 points 14 hours ago

ITT

is this the best this community can do? don't y'all get tired of bitching about Plex?

I'm glad you brought up the rule in a vague way.

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.

your post doesn't meet the criteria, so it doesn't belong in this community.

[–] yodeljunkmanenvy@piefed.social 0 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

No, Plex is not self-hosting. Once they tried to get me to purchase a Plex Pass for remote access, I knew I needed something else that didn't have a paywall.

That said, many people find their way to better services like Jellyfin by first using Plex and coming to this same conclusion, so I am not going to write off the Plex people yet. They will figure it out one day 🙂

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[–] trewq@lemmy.world 0 points 20 hours ago

Big fat NO

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