We have recently experienced a security incident that may potentially involve your Plex account information. We believe the actual impact of this incident is limited; however, action is required from you to ensure your account remains secure. What happened An unauthorized third party accessed a limited subset of customer data from one of our databases. While we quickly contained the incident, information that was accessed included emails, usernames, securely hashed passwords and authentication...
I am curious as to why people thing Plex is self hosting if Plex can change how your server functions? I have never personally considered it self hosting but do others still think it is?
Yes. It’s running on my server. That I host.
And you fully control the service?
Depends on how you use it. Doubtful anyone here has the Plex devs on payroll… Not any other self-hostable softwares devs … updates will come.
Because you are hosting the server software on your own hardware. That’s literally self-hosting. Plex provides a way to remotely access your server through their own network as well, which is optional.
The problem with Plex is it isn’t fully hosted. Plex controls user passwords. You can’t use it without logging into their servers.
On a side note: you can remotely access any service running on home network via Tailscale[1] / Cloudflare Tunnel. Your services are never exposed on Internet. Moreover, you don’t need to rely on Plex for that.
[1] https://tailscale.com/ [2] https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-networks/
Tailscale is going public, so I don’t really trust them anymore. I used Cloudflare tunnels for a while, but I strongly dislike being dependent on them for accessing my own network, and I don’t like how they recently clamped down on “anti-piracy”. There are some legitimate sites I still can’t access (dirtbike parts and whatnot) because Cloudflare straight up blocks access to them.
Even if the source code is open?
Android is open source and look what Google is trying to do with that.
By your logic the *arr suite isn’t self hosted either since they rely on metadata cache servers.
In fact Jellyfin relies on external services for their metadata too!
Plex is self hosting, the auth is not.
Actual answer.
Even though there are some cloud services like remote server management, proxies, and 3rd party integration, I do actually have to run the software myself on my hardware. Hence, self hosted.
You are a bot? That’s what I’m seeing in Boost anyhow
why stop there! let’s do the same for all the “self-host” projects that use CDNs or remotely hosted resources.
it’s not self-hosted unless it’s 100% hosted locally.
Right, he who does not rely on someone elses DNS-server shall throw the first stone!
How is that any different than any other software package? Unless you’re coding it yourself, things can be changed without your permission.
And even if you do code it yourself, you may have dependencies that do undesirable things outside your control.