MudMan

Yeah, we’re almost there. If you buy a pre-packaged box with Home Assistant you’re most of the way there. If you look under the hood most commercial NAS options and even some routers are scraping that territory as well.

I think the way it needs to work to go mainstream is you buy some box that you plug in to your router and it just sets up a handful of (what looks to you) like web services you can access from anywhere. No more steps needed.

The biggest blockers right now are that everybody in that space is too worried giving you the appearance of control and customizability to go that hard towards end-user focus… and that for some reason we as a planet are still dragging our feet on easily accessible permanent addresses for average users and still relying on hacks and workarounds.

The tech is there, though. You could be selling home server alternatives to the could leaning into enshittification annoyance with the tech we have today. There’s just nobody trying to do an iServe because everybody is chasing that subscription money instead, and those who aren’t are FOSS nerds that want their home server stuff to look weird and custom and hard.

Yeah, that’s exactly where it comes from. And it fits just fine for people like you, doing it for a living. It’s just a bit obnoxious when us normies dabbling with what is now fairly approachable hobbyist home networking try to cosplay as that. I mean, come on, Brad, you’re not unwinding after work with more server stuff, you just have a Plex and a Pi-hole you mess around with while avoiding having actual face time with your family.

And that’s alright, by the way. I think part of why the nomenclature makes me snarky is that I actually think we’re on the cusp of this stuff being very doable by everybody at scale. People are still running small services in dedicated Raspberry Pis and buying proprietary NASs that can do a bunch of one-button self-hosting. If you gave it a good push you could start marketing self-contained home server boxes as a mainstream product, it’s just that the people doing that are more concerned with selling you a bunch of hard drives and the current batch of midcore users like me are more than happy to go on about their “homelab” and pretend they’re doing a lot more work than they actually are to keep their couple of docker containers running.

Yeeeeah, I have less of a problem for that, because… well yeah, people host stuff for you all the time, right? Any time you’re a client the host is someone else. Self-hosting makes some sense for services where you’re both the host and the client.

Technically you’re not self hosting anything for your family in that case, you’re just… hosting it, but I can live with it.

I do think this would all go down easier if we had a nice marketable name for it. I don’t know, power-internetting, or “the information superdriveway”. This was all easier in the 90s, I guess is what I’m accidentally saying.

This is a me thing and not related to this video specifically, but I absolutely hate that we’ve settled on “homelab” as a term for “I have software in some computer I expose to my home network”.

It makes sense if you are also a system administrator of an online service and you’re testing stuff before you deploy it, but a home server isn’t a “lab” for anything, it’s the final server you’re using and don’t plan to do anything else with. Your kitchen isn’t a “test kitchen” just because you’re serving food to your family.

Sorry, pet peeve over. The video is actually ok.

Well, you know, Europe can’t just take every refugee from an underdeveloped country that just wants to migrate for economic reasons. There needs to be some border control for these people, otherwise it won’t be sustainable.

Nah, I’m kidding, it’s all racism, if you’re an American it’s probably fine.

Well, I’m kinda kidding there, too, it’s still a ton of work and paperwork to get a proper visa that allows work and permanent residency, but it IS much, much easier if you’re a relatively affluent American.

See? Told ya.

The honest answer is that word is “middle class”, but you’ll all be mad at me for saying it out loud.

I guess it depends on how much you do your homework. I just spent a while listening to Satya Nadella regurgitate self-congratulatory CEO-speak just to verify that yes, indeed, this link is gargbage. I feel entitled to at least a bit of resentment for that.

Ironically, the time I spent doing this was much shorter because the podcast that originates the blatant misquote has an AI-generated searchable transcript.

He doesn’t. He says he cares more about generating growth (and thus presumably revenue) than about AGI.

Also, this thing is from February.

Social media sucks. Reporting on reporting sucks. News aggregators suck.

AI may suck, but it’s definitely not alone in being shitty. We’re all clearly very good at tool-less, artisanal misinformation.

I think your read on what people typically do with Plex probably doesn’t align with reality. I also think in the end you’re way less optimistic about the potential of open source software than I am. There are multiple areas where OSS options are either dominant or very competitive, but I am also clearly way less picky about how that gradient of openness to commerciality than you are. We can agree that it’s fine that there are options for both or all steps in that gradient, but there is a ton of snark and all-or-nothing attitude in that community as well.

I will say that If you have a commercial option like Plex and a couple of open alternatives (say Kodi and Jellyfin for the sake of argument) I would prefer one of those to have the type of UX that can compete with the closed commercial product because you can compete with open alternatives.

If jellyfin adopted HA’s model of paid development, I’d be thrilled. But HA’s strategy is actually pretty unique, it’ll take time for that structure to be stress-tested and propagate.

Well, hey, there we agree, then. I’d say that the setup for HA is actually fairly Mozilla-like, and people don’t seem thrilled with THAT, so it wasn’t a given you’d agree. Plex certainly isn’t that. For one thing it’s commercial and closed source. But crucially HA’s commercial branch WILL have a bunch of your data, including voice processing and login info, if you do buy into their paid subscription service.

As for the rest of the argument, most is redundant so I’m not gonna go through the loop again, I am actually busy. But I will add a few things. For one thing, whether I think FOSS is worth “any level of inconvenience” is irrelevant. I do, and I do live with the inconvenience in some cases. But if the goal is for FOSS to be mainstream and a primary choice (and it can absolutely be, there are plenty of examples), then it doesn’t matter what I think. The reason the privacy tradeoffs make sense for Plex is that Plex is an app your family is likely to use. Mine does, and they sure won’t put up with bad UX for the sake of using an open alternative. OBS didn’t crush Xsplit out of the market because of ideology, it did it because it became more powerful, usable and reliable.

And let me clarify I don’t “blow smoke for Plex”. I opened this whole subthread by saying I wanted to use Jellyfin (hence all the testing we’ve been nitpicking about) but couldn’t justify it. I’ve said this above. I’d drop Plex in a heartbeat if Jellyfin was just as good to use for me and the rest of my household. But it isn’t. There’s no reason to blow smoke for Plex, but there is a reason to not delusionally pretend that open source alterantives are better than they are. You’re not going to gaslight normies into using them that way and the complacency just makes it less likely for them to succeed at what they’re trying to do. It is, after all, the year of Linux desktop.

I mean, my Plex server is on a Fedora machine, it seems to be doing fine. I have gotten into arguments here about how frustrating it is that Linux advocates pretend every usability problem for Windows users is solved and that “just use Mint” is a valid solution to that issue. If you want to know how that goes, it goes a lot like this conversation.

On topic, using any external login or remote access third party service for your self hosted services is a significant change in how much info is not controlled by you, nobody is arguing that. There’s a conversation to be had about whether that’s worth it for most users. Like I said earlier, is it a good thing for Home Assistant to provide a paid subscription service that will handle that for you? For most people I’d say yes, it’s still a much safer, more flexible alternative to Google’s or Amazon’s ecosystem, so why not? Baby steps.

But if you’re already using a commercial service that already has a proprietary login then no, it doesn’t matter. Plex already knows which clients go to your server. It does not need Google for anything here, having Google’s SSO doesn’t give them any information they already have. It does give that to Google, but if your concern is the cops are going to bang on your door for all your illegal pixels that you stream then you’re just as boned. It’s borderline irresponsible to pretend otherwise.

As for the “I have nothing to hide” thing… look, if you want to have this argument with someone else go pester them instead. It’s not “I have nothing to hide”, it’s “this commercial service that I use does something that is legal and I intend to both take advantage of that and defend my right to own my media”. How you get “I have nothing to hide” out of that is your own pretzel logic.

I have a right to store, backup and access my own media and to keep a copy of it for private use. I will exercise that right regardless of how many US corpos pretend that hey own the very concept of showing video to people. I am doing nothing illegal here and of the perfectly legal software options to do this perfectly legal thing I chose the one that had better usability for my family to be comfortable using it. This comes at the cost of an external service storing some of our data, just like our Netlfix and Disney+ subscriptions do, but since I’m not keeping a media server performatively that is a tradeoff we have made on a bunch of places because not everybody who lives here is willing to do homework to be able to use their devices. That cool with you?

For the record, I don’t have any misgivings about FOSS as a concept. I do have remarkable contempt for people who want it to keep being a minority option because they like being in the secret treehouse and don’t want everybody else learning about it. Widespread, successful FOSS doesn’t look like half-baked UX and hobbyist programmers working for nothing in their spare time, and I would certainly like to see a landscape where alongisde hobby projects we have a solid stable of financially sustainable professionally made open source alternatives that anybody can get into. Jellyfin isn’t even the worse offender here. If nothing else it’s frustrating because it could be a more approachable sustainable alternative in the vein of your Blenders or Home Assistants… but it’s kinda not, and that sucks.

You are saying many things about the legality of this, especially internationally and regarding what Plex is or isn’t obligated to do, that are a bit of a stretch. But man, are they put in context by the admission of left wing cosplay there at the end where you concede you do think “a little bit of crime is good, actually”, which explains a lot of the hack the world mentality and why you feel so cool and dangerous by sharing some torrents you got with a slightly larger group of people than your direct family.

I still do think that’s counterproductive if you ever want a scenario where the late-capitalist media distribution landscape gets at least a modicum of competition from more reasonable and sustainable alternatives. That you prefer to feel edgy than to propose a viable scenario for that is all well and good, but I wish you didn’t feel the need to do that at people.

For the record, you are still wrong about SSO. Again it makes sense that if you’re cosplaying cops and robbers “this thing bad, this thing bad, both together worse” sounds reasonable, but if you really were at risk of any real legal liability that’s really not how that would play out. In the real world ANY leak of that information from any source would be an absolute problem. So the Google login could be a problem by itself, and the Plex data gathering would be a much bigger problem by itself, but both together would just mean you are exactly as screwed as with just one.

But you think it’s cool to crap on Google (which I guess it is) and are cosplaying, so that’s a cool thing to perform outrage about even if it doesn’t really matter in this scenario. Which I’m increasingly realizing is all this conversation is about, from the “I’m so good at networking and system administration” braggadocio to the “I’m such a dangerous anarchist criminal that doesn’t give a crap about the rules because I’m so good they can’t catch me” stuff.

FWIW, I do care about self-hosting as a viable commercial alternative and about a legal framework to support it, but even if I didn’t think it was possible (which it is, and some people at least are working along those lines) I am not ready to give up on the changes required to get there just to feel cool on the Internet. You do you, though, just… try not to scare the normies away. Not that there are any normies around here anyway, so I guess we’re safe on that front.

Man, you keep thinking that taking digs about how it’s all a skill issue is either an argument or an insult, and I keep reminding you that even if there was a skill issue at play (and there wasn’t), being hard or annoying to use is the actual problem. If your UX allows for skill issues in making a straightforward setup run then it’s a UX issue.

Also, me using Plex to host copies of my own media legally is not the same as operating a P2P service. But if it’s any consolation I have no intention to set foot on that hellhole anyway, given that US authorities seem to not need copyright overreach to throw you in a room with no windows indefinitely these days. Good luck with that.

Oh, and yes, those are mutually exclusive. Or mutually inclusive, to be more accurate. If your concern is the govenrment overreach implications of having a portion of your data leaked, worrying about a smaller leak along the way of actively generating a larger leak is entirely pointless. Conversely, I’d argue that if you have a dozen users and are terrified that the cops are going to come and raid the… I’m gonna say meth lab you’re running on the side, we’re back to the conversation about how cool you are with that dozen users having their Jellyfin clients running on a bunch of Android devices, Smart TVs, Windows boxes or whatever else.

Again, I keep struggling with the irony of this weird position having entirely bought into the narrative that self-hosting media is inherently illegal or dangerous. I came into this argument from the UX angle, you guys are increasingly convincing me that a significant disincentive for self-hosting to become mainstream is that its entire community is convinced that they are doing something wrong, apparently. It’s not that I hadn’t noticed how central to the whole thing a bunch of P2P-specific paraphernalia happens to be, but I wasn’t ready for the gatekeeping to come with a side of edgy 90s we’re-so-bad hack-the-world stuff.

I think you’re giving their ability to coordinate too much credit. Best guess the ISPs are just withholding anything that requires investment to deploy or that they can monetize themselves. Everybody else is just bottom-feeding by selling workarounds wherever the ISPs can’t or won’t.

The invisible hand of the market sucks at creating optimal solutions, but it does great at creating scammy crap that will take your money, no conspiracy necessary.

I am glad you don’t. Not that I’d pay you for therapy. I mean, no offense, but your bedside manner is terrible, you’ve lost your shit multiple times and you keep trying to pass double bind crap as reasonable arguments in decidedly toxic ways. You’re a 5/10 opinionated online interlocutor, but a 3/10 therapist at best.

I have absolutely not been willfully misreading. You can’t argue that the guy saying he has a problem with Google’s sign-in specifically has a point and also say that the data mining happening within Plex is WAY more intrusive. If the point is whether giving Google this data is a problem it must be worse than using any of the other sign-in options. But it isn’t. Your data is as widely available one way or the other. It is reasonable to think Plex’s visibility over your server is too much, I accept that, particularly if your use case runs afoul of their EULA…

…but then you can’t tell me “I don’t trust Google”, unless your argument is you trust Plex more for some reason. Which you shouldn’t. It just doesn’t follow.

Oh, and they do sell your data for advertising. There’s an opt-in for it, though. Since we’re talking about legality, it’d be a punishable offense for them to sell your data without your consent, which is why that’s there, and they do need to tell you what data they collect if you request it.

And no, I am not liable under US law. There is a treaty that requires both parties to meet those requirements, but US law isn’t directly applicable over here. What is applicable is our own legislation made to comply with those trade agreements. Which includes exemptions for private copy.

As far as I and every piece of legal advice I’ve seen about this knows, anyway. If you have a source for how apparently US law is directly applicable to any country they have a trade agreement with feel free to point me to this insane new paradigm of international law, though.

Why do you think I didn’t look at what the default settings were? I mean, I told you a bunch of times I went as far as getting into bug reports mentioning similar symptoms, you think I just didn’t click the checkmark for “don’t turn your computer into a doorstop”?

I didn’t change any defaults I didn’t need to and I didn’t have a complicated task for it (and let’s be honest, if I did you’d be here telling me that it’s user error for trying to make it do complicated things). That doesn’t mean I didn’t set it up.

But yes, absolutely, a self-hosted open source app is supposed to guess what my setup is. At least as much as its paid competitor. Because that’s my entire point, UX matters and being open source is no excuse for your UX sucking, people are just going to use whatever works best. All the well intentioned whining about security and independence in the world won’t beat UX. So if you want more OSS get OSS devs to focus on usability.

But hey, I do appreciate the honesty of admitting this defense of Jellyfin’s UX is not about Jellyfin’s UX being as good as Plex’s, it’s an ideological argument independent from UX.

Which is fine, I share your goals. I want Jellyfin to be bigger than Plex.

But for that it needs to be as good as Plex. Or better. And it isn’t.

I’ve been vague about the details because you are digging your heels into an argument about a one week test run I did a while ago on a piece of software that didn’t do what I wanted. “My use case” was “go in there and scrape my video library” on a default install.

The reason I even tried to plug in live IPTV, by the way, is that people made a big deal of Plex’s obsession pushing for it, since they plug it in by default and have their own default list of channels pre-baked. Even if I don’t use it much on Plex, and I really don’t, it was an interesting test case for how the two pieces of software handle their extra options. For all the crap Plex got for trying to become Netflix, and I do agree it’s a fool’s errand, it was a depressing reminder of how commercial software and OSS often handle UX differently.

Oh, and if the implication is that Jellyfin got itself a better default skin, then good for them, but I saw the interface not that long ago and it still looked pretty grim. And yeah, screw them for letting me customize it. That’s bad. Entirely reskinning software is a bad feature that adds next to nothing but complexity if you have good designers make a good UI in the first place. It’s fine to have as an extra, but it should either be very well packaged or waaaay out of the way for power users. The average user shouldn’t have to think about it. Turning on dark mode, maybe, and even that would be a disappointing omission of a “take system setting” option as a default. UX IS important.

And no, I refuse to concede that self-hosting entails annoying, convoluted setups. There are multiple commercial solutions to this that are different degrees of “better than nothing”. At ground level plenty of routers or self-hosted products will one-click set up a VPN for you, which is not great but at least works around the issue. On the other end it’s a remote service provider managing your remote access and then yeah, there’s data form you leaking elsewhere, but that as an option is at least useful. It’s not just pure corpo closed source like Plex, either. Home Assistant’s for-profit arm will gladly take your subscription money and handle remote access for you. Whether you trust them more or less than Google (or not at all and want to set up yourself) is up to you.

Also, again, I checked this a while ago, but given how many other people are up and down this thread claiming (and not being disputed) that Jellyfin is still less fire-and-forget for parsing, I don’t know how “outdated” that is. You should ping the two separate people who recommended third party software to scrub media libraries so they’d work with Kodi/Jellyfin and explain to them that this is now entirely unnecessary.

And I didn’t say that ebooks were “a basic UX block” (although it sucking did make me go for a Plex/Komga setup, not a Plex/Jellyfin setup, so… I guess it is on that front). I gave you a list. I’m not going back to Jellyfin just to verify that you’re obviously wrong about it all having been perfectly fixed up to Plex’s standards, because I’m pretty sure the bunch of people saying the opposite all over this thread aren’t making it up.

UX matters. Jellyfin’s UX is much, much worse than Plex’s. I wish it wasn’t, but it was bad enough when I tried it to push me away and a whole bunch of people here are claiming the same thing. Being delusional about the quality of the implementation doesn’t make it better.

You are correct, I don’t care about any of that either. And I know about the boilerplate. Bud.

You need to agree with yourself about what you’re arguing. Are you saying that the problem is the SSO or Plex?

Because if Plex will go tell on you it will do it based on the data they have internally, not based on any data captured by the login flow, so the SSO is not additional issue compared to using Plex without the Google login and using the email login instead.

And if you’re arguing that the SSO is the problem and not Plex which you indignantly reminded me is what the thread was about, then you’re arguing against yourself, because it sure seems we agree that if Plex is going to take any action against you illegally sharing files through their system (which, by the way, they are legally obligated to do) it won’t be due to the Google login at all, which is just a bit of convenience and doesn’t seem to provide anybody with any data they don’t already have.

Once again, you are super keen on playing up hypotheticals. Once again, the biggest issue with those hypotheticals is that Plex boots me out… of Plex. I am not doing anything illegal with it or even breaching their EULA, including the paragraphs you quote (not that something being written down in an EULA makes it applicalbe, but still). I will bite that bullet and live with Jellyfin’s implementation if and when that happens. Which it likely won’t.