Friends and syncing query

If you set your profile to allow your friends to view your watchlist and watch history do you also need to enable “Sync my watch state and Ratings” ?

Yes. Otherwise these data would never arrive at plex.tv which is from where they are fetched by Plex friends.

The why: Remember, a Plex friend is not necessarily also a sharee (that was the case a few years ago, but this connection has been severed by the introduction of Discover Together). So the friend couldn’t get that information from your server, because it is not guaranteed that he has even access to it.
And there is of course also all the media consumption outside of Plex, which may be in your history because you marked them as “played” or “watchlisted” on https://watch.plex.tv

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OK thanks.

If I have other people in my house using my server who are friends, would the sync be needed in that case?

There is no difference between remote and local friends.

OK thanks.

Seems to me “Account Visibility and Activity Sharing” should be greyed out then if syncing is off as it won’t achieve anything?

Agreed. I will forward that to the right people.

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I was reminded of a situation where those preferences still do something, even if the syncing with a personal server is disabled:
When you’re watching something on the various streaming options directly from plex.tv
So it is not suitable to dim them in the UI.

“Account visibility” has nothing to do with your local server at all. It is mainly there for restricting other plex users from finding your user account (i.e. not your server, but you as a plex user). In other words; you control with it how easy it is for other plex users to befriend you.

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