"Plex added a paid license for remote streaming, a feature that was previously free. And then Plex decided to also sell personal data — I sure love self-hosted software spying on me."
How is it "self-hosted" if it's "remote streaming?" And if you're hosting it, you can throttle any outgoing traffic you want. Right?
The only other examples are Mattermost and MinIO... which I don't know much about, but again: Aren't you in control of your own host?
This article is lame. How about focusing on back-ends that pretend to support self-hosting but make it difficult by perpetuating massive gaps in its documentation (looking at you, Supabase)?
> How is it "self-hosted" if it's "remote streaming?" And if you're hosting it, you can throttle any outgoing traffic you want. Right?
You host the plex service with your media library. Plex allows you to stream without opening up your firewall to others. Not sure now it works exactly because I never hosted it myself.
> Plex allows you to stream without opening up your firewall to others.
It relies on their hosted services/infrastructure. I avoid Plex for that reason. I just host my media with nginx + indexing enabled. Wireguard for creating the tunnel between the server-client and Kodi as the frontend to view the media (you can add an indexed http server as a media source).
Works great, no transcoding like Plex, but that's less of an issue nowadays when hardware accelerated decoders are common for h264 & h265.
Im confused. There are two different streaming things on Plex. They support streaming inside the plex app of content from the usual streaming services, much like Apple TV or your TV’s built in media manager. They also support streaming your collection across the internet to wherever you are. Which is now behind a paywall?
Maybe I'm missing something here: the great thing about self-hosting is that you choose if and when you update your back-end software. What's stopping self-hosting admins from simply staying on a known good version and forking that if they so desire?
Where are you seeing that? From what I can tell, the 10k message limit applies to "Mattermost Entry":
> Mattermost Entry gives small, forward-leaning teams a free self-hosted Intelligent Mission Environment to get started on improving their mission-critical secure collaborative workflows. Entry has all features of Enterprise Advanced with the following server-wide limitations and omissions:
in the last 5-10yrs...letsencrypt made ssl much easier..and its possible to host on small,cheap arm devices...
yes no more dyndns free accounts... but u can still use afraid or do cf tunnels maybe?
and in some cases nowadays u can get away with
docker-compose up
and some of those things like minio and mattermost are complaints about the free tier or complaints about self hosting? i can't tell
indeed the easiest "self hosting" ever was when ngrok happened.. u could get ur port listening on the internet without a sign up... by just running a single binary without a flag...
Nowadays for self hosted DNS the solution I use is Pihole + Tailscale (for the Pihole DNS anywhere) if I could figure it out in one afternoon it is pretty idiot proof.
It doesn't. There's seemingly no connection between the handful of examples of self-hosting software actually getting worse, and the earlier point about hardware costs.
On-premming your Internet services just seems like an exercise in self-flagellation.
Unless you have a heavy-duty pipe to your prem you're just risking all kinds of headaches, and you're going to have to put your stuff behind Cloudflare anyway and if you're doing that why not use a VPS?
It's just not practical for someone to run a little blog or app that way.
It's not that much headache, and this isn't necessarily about public-facing sites and apps.
Take file storage: Some folks find Google Drive and similar services unpalatable because they can and will scan your content. Setting up Nextcloud or even just using file sharing built into a consumer router is pretty easy.
You don't need to rely on Cloudflare, either. Some routers come with VPN functionality or can have it added.
The self-hosting most people talk about when they talk about self-hosting is very practical.
People are going to start doing this a lot more as agents improve. Most people only need a very small fraction of the features of SaaS, and that fraction is slightly different for everyone, so the economics of companies trying to use features to chase users is bad. Even worse, if you're on SaaS you can't modify the code, which will be crippling, so the whole SaaS model is cooked.
I think co-management is going to be the next paradigm.
Typical whining from this corner of the Internet. Maximalism around being owed any promised feature and ongoing open source development for life isn't compatible with a healthy and consumer-appealing self-hosting market.
I don't understand this fairly sparse "article."
"Plex added a paid license for remote streaming, a feature that was previously free. And then Plex decided to also sell personal data — I sure love self-hosted software spying on me."
How is it "self-hosted" if it's "remote streaming?" And if you're hosting it, you can throttle any outgoing traffic you want. Right?
The only other examples are Mattermost and MinIO... which I don't know much about, but again: Aren't you in control of your own host?
This article is lame. How about focusing on back-ends that pretend to support self-hosting but make it difficult by perpetuating massive gaps in its documentation (looking at you, Supabase)?
> How is it "self-hosted" if it's "remote streaming?" And if you're hosting it, you can throttle any outgoing traffic you want. Right?
You host the plex service with your media library. Plex allows you to stream without opening up your firewall to others. Not sure now it works exactly because I never hosted it myself.
> Plex allows you to stream without opening up your firewall to others.
It relies on their hosted services/infrastructure. I avoid Plex for that reason. I just host my media with nginx + indexing enabled. Wireguard for creating the tunnel between the server-client and Kodi as the frontend to view the media (you can add an indexed http server as a media source).
Works great, no transcoding like Plex, but that's less of an issue nowadays when hardware accelerated decoders are common for h264 & h265.
Do you have any recommendations for decoders? I've been using a fire stick for a bit but I wouldn't mind a better alternative.
Im confused. There are two different streaming things on Plex. They support streaming inside the plex app of content from the usual streaming services, much like Apple TV or your TV’s built in media manager. They also support streaming your collection across the internet to wherever you are. Which is now behind a paywall?
Maybe I'm missing something here: the great thing about self-hosting is that you choose if and when you update your back-end software. What's stopping self-hosting admins from simply staying on a known good version and forking that if they so desire?
Security updates is what's stopping them often.
You also realistically can't fork things unless multiple people do, and they all stay interested in the fork.
you choose if and when you update your back-end software
That's what we say it's about. But it's really about open source devs being our slaves forever. Get to work, Mattermost! (whip crack)
Did you read the Github issue? These guys are paying customers.
Where are you seeing that? From what I can tell, the 10k message limit applies to "Mattermost Entry":
> Mattermost Entry gives small, forward-leaning teams a free self-hosted Intelligent Mission Environment to get started on improving their mission-critical secure collaborative workflows. Entry has all features of Enterprise Advanced with the following server-wide limitations and omissions:
https://docs.mattermost.com/product-overview/editions-and-of...
If so that is indeed shitty. I thought they were crippling the free tier.
in the last 5-10yrs...letsencrypt made ssl much easier..and its possible to host on small,cheap arm devices...
yes no more dyndns free accounts... but u can still use afraid or do cf tunnels maybe?
and in some cases nowadays u can get away with
docker-compose up
and some of those things like minio and mattermost are complaints about the free tier or complaints about self hosting? i can't tell
indeed the easiest "self hosting" ever was when ngrok happened.. u could get ur port listening on the internet without a sign up... by just running a single binary without a flag...
Mattermost is infamous crippleware and they charge more than slack for a worse product if you pay. Use Zulip.
Nowadays for self hosted DNS the solution I use is Pihole + Tailscale (for the Pihole DNS anywhere) if I could figure it out in one afternoon it is pretty idiot proof.
If you’re self-hosting, do you need 128GB of ram?
I suspect you don’t. I suspect a couple of beelinks could run your whole business (minus the GPU needs).
I run quite a few services with a used Dell Wyse 5070 thin client PC from 2018 with 4GB of ram.
2/3 of this article is about DRAM prices. How is that "enshittification" of self-hosting?
Maybe the remaining 1/3 answers the question.
It doesn't. There's seemingly no connection between the handful of examples of self-hosting software actually getting worse, and the earlier point about hardware costs.
This is a year-in-review article. A scattering of topics is the point.
I suppose writing an article title is hard. The article could be about a few different related things. The hardware and the software side of it.
That’s about all I’ll say though, not my article.
time marches forward but instead of progress we go backwards. expect to write your own software on limited resources like its 1990 again.
On-premming your Internet services just seems like an exercise in self-flagellation.
Unless you have a heavy-duty pipe to your prem you're just risking all kinds of headaches, and you're going to have to put your stuff behind Cloudflare anyway and if you're doing that why not use a VPS?
It's just not practical for someone to run a little blog or app that way.
It's not that much headache, and this isn't necessarily about public-facing sites and apps.
Take file storage: Some folks find Google Drive and similar services unpalatable because they can and will scan your content. Setting up Nextcloud or even just using file sharing built into a consumer router is pretty easy.
You don't need to rely on Cloudflare, either. Some routers come with VPN functionality or can have it added.
The self-hosting most people talk about when they talk about self-hosting is very practical.
Some of us have have LAN for our offices and TBs of data.
I don’t think you understand what on-premises means.
I don't fully understand the complaints about enshittification of open source permissively licensed software.
If the source code is available for you to fork, modify, and maintain as you see fit, what's the complaining really about?
People are going to start doing this a lot more as agents improve. Most people only need a very small fraction of the features of SaaS, and that fraction is slightly different for everyone, so the economics of companies trying to use features to chase users is bad. Even worse, if you're on SaaS you can't modify the code, which will be crippling, so the whole SaaS model is cooked.
I think co-management is going to be the next paradigm.
What's co-management?
Managed services that you have some ability to modify, to customize or add functionality.
I hate to tell them but everything is being enshittified.
Typical whining from this corner of the Internet. Maximalism around being owed any promised feature and ongoing open source development for life isn't compatible with a healthy and consumer-appealing self-hosting market.