Selfhosted

I see some posts taking about jellyfin and tailscale and I find it interesting that it's not mentioned tailscale is a private company. Why are they not being held to the same standard as Plex? How long before it becomes enshittified? I saw they have a free plan but give it time until they realize the number of users in the free tier are large enough to monetize.

edit: I'm prepared to be down voted but mark this and see where it ends up at.

Edit2: and I'm not defending Plex. I agree it's a shitty move.

Fuck them, glad I switched to Jellyfin years ago.

I'm coming up on 5 years as a Plex pass owner, so my users and I will not be impacted by this change. In five more years if they asked me nicely to pay another $89 to support the service I would. Send me some stickers and put a badge on my server. I get a lot of use out of the software/service, as do my family members.

I will say, I am quite annoyed at the wording and audience of this email. Jellyfin is just not an option for me until there is excellent feature parity with Plex. I know they are a lot of Jellyfin fans here, in my opinion, Plex is a significantly better experience for me.

The beginning of enshittification.

Prices will keep climbing, functionality reduced in favor of service tiers, and of course ads, ads, and ads.

People use Plex?

Lol "Your Friends at Plex"

get fucked, assholes, Jellyfin is better anyway

I don't use Plex. I have never used Plex. But based on the one time I tried, this doesn't surprise me even a little bit.

Years ago I installed it on my NAS, it was a one click download package. I installed it and hit the button to set it up. And then it prompted me to make a cloud account.

Why do I need a cloud account? I am logging into my local server and I am not sharing anything with anybody nor am I subscribing to any cloud services. I have no need of a cloud account. But, the way they built the thing, you need a cloud account to log into your local system.

I did not create a cloud account. I uninstalled it. I concluded that a company that claims to care about user privacy, but requires cloud integration in an area that absolutely does not require cloud anything, does not actually give a shit about privacy. I Googled and found that the requirement for a cloud account was, at the time, a fairly new thing. Lots of people didn't like it. I concluded that this company was beginning to enshittify, although this was years ago and none of us had heard that word yet. But either way, it was obvious that the company was moving in a not customer-friendly direction and I did not want to be along for the ride.

My choice has been proven right several times over the years since. And yes, every time they remove a feature, or make some other customer unfriendly decision, I retell this story.

The moral here is that a company either cares about its customers or it doesn't, and it's usually pretty easy to tell which one fairly quickly. When one bad decision is made, and not corrected, others will follow.

Synology is the latest example of that. For anyone not paying attention, they have recently announced that their 2025 series units will only work with Synology branded hard drives, which are of course more expensive than standard Seagate or Western Digital drives (which work just fine). But if you look, the bread crumbs are there and form a trail. Over the last few years they have removed features, for example the device is no longer can decode h.265 surveillance video, and the units will no longer display SMART data for 'unsupported' drives. I say no longer because they used to, but an update changed that so they no longer do.

Bottom line though is don't do business with companies that don't respect you.

Once you invite an MBA in you can never uninvite them…

What was the appeal of Plex anyway?

I never got the idea of selfhosting but paying (except for enterprise-grade support or donations) anyway.

Welcome to jellyfin!

I am very fortunate in that before Plex I found and used ps3 media server/universal media server. Because of that, it always felt odd paying just to stream my own content on my own hardware. I am certainly not against paying developers, but Plex always felt like paying for another service, not donating to an awesome Dev cause I love what they do. Another reason I stopped using Plex, I couldn't get anyone but myself to give a dam and use Plex, (suddenly, when NETFLIX gets The Last Air Bender, NOW my sibling wants to binge watch it. 🙁). Jellyfin has served me just fine so far, it fucks up only in the same situation plex did, when I try watching with someone else.

I love Plex and will continue using it. I bought a lifetime Plex Pass years ago for and have no regrets. My Plex Pass means none of my watchers have to worry about paying anything.

LOL, aren't there at least a half dozen open source alternatives for Plex?

"your friends"

dude my friends don't charge me for shit

Wonder how long those 2.99 a month figures will last. I give it a year before there's no seperate remote streaming package and the only remaining one is >10$. The main appeal of Plex was not paying. It's used by pirates. The goal is content for free. It's no longer free. I don't care at all if random people can use my Plex server. If they are unwilling to adapt to a new platform, then I guess they'll resubscribe to Netflix. Most of them never unsubscribed from Netflix to begin with.

This was the end for me. Used Plex for almost a decade. I'm off to Jellyfin. It's actually almost no change whatsoever to integrate it into my home setup.