Ah heck I’m not the person to post online but this has me waxing philosophic. So out comes the good whiskey. 2 things in the past year and half or so have profoundly affected my outlook on tech and how I relate to it: switching to linux from windows, and installed PMS as my first self-hosted server. Windows updated and rebooted my computer against my will and without my permission one too many times, and I realized me and the folks at Microsoft disagree on one fundamental thing, namely, who owns my computer. I thought I owned it and could do what I liked with it, Microsoft thought they owned it and could do what they liked with it. Note that like with much of the craziness in the world today, it’s not so much about the isolated events but rather the fundamental differences in values they represent. I’ve come to see that applies to every software as a service type business model. There is a fundamental disagreement on ownership between the parties involved. Additionally it seems like in the past 5 years or so, maybe more like ten years, the goals of software changed, slowly then all at once, from making life or work easier and letting the user do new, useful things to capturing as much of their attention as possible. It’s a simplification but a useful and true one I think. Individually it’s not a huge deal, but damn if I didn’t get tired of disabling the discover/streaming provider/tidal music/Live TV tabs on every new Plex client I set up (I always wondered why there was not a server wide “off” switch for this). But the more ubiquitous and advanced the tech has become, the more centralized and invasive it has become. Hence my disagreement with Microsoft.
Plex, along with Linux OS, gave me a taste of the alternative.
Technology has been a massive force for homogenization, centralization, control and monitoring. Yet despite the downward trajectory plex was clearly on when I started using it, it helped me connect with the positive potential of technology, it’s power to decentralize, return control to the individual, and be the wielder of the technology rather than merely the consumer of it. Yes, all these free and open source projects are fundamentally unsustainable by their very nature. Yes, setting up open source, self-hosted tech can be a massive PITA. I remember my first forays, reading reddit groups or github pages, practically pulling my hair out because everyone said “look at the logs” and I had no idea where the heck Linux was saving the logs for anything. I remember when I accidentally nuked my entire Home Assistant setup because I didn’t understand docker volume mapping (I had an unpleasant surprise when I restarted my container for the first time!) Yes, anything currently competing with Plex is not as polished, nor as plug n play. But, the competence I gain in manipulating my tools rather than being manipulated by them is worth it to me. Competence, in my mind, is freedom. Sure, I couldn’t program any of this myself, or build my own computer (I mean from raw materials), but I also can’t build a car from scratch - that doesn’t keep me from seeing where the “self driving car” trend is going and what that will do to man when we are no longer able to manipulate our own automobiles.
I started this journey with Plex, but they have a fundamentally different goal for “my” server (I suspect deep down at least at the executive level it is not really seen as “mine”) but the philosophic and practical differences are too apparent now. I expect my technology to help accomplish my goals, and if it’s a business, to make money doing so; Plex has their own goals for their technology, only tangentially related to mine. To be fair I think it was already this way when I started using it but I was too much the novice technologically and in my philosophy of technology to see it.
And to those defending Plex and their kind- is this the biggest deal in the world? No. But the line has to be drawn in the sand somewhere. I now have no idea what kind of data plex is keeping track of, nor do I care to find out, particularly. What matters to me now is the fundamental difference in values, not the perceived importance of any individual infraction.
God bless and good day!
Edit - after investigating further I did find the option to disable the discover/online media sources in the server, that’s on me for not noticing that before. It took wondering why my own media was buried under a dozen or so ads when I did a search (always had navigated directly to my content) to make me look into it.
But, I’d rather not be at the mercy of plexs goodwill when it comes to control over my own server, which to sum up my wall of text is what it seems the core issue is: Plex disagrees that it is in fact my server.
