MudMan

It is between 0.1 and 0.05% the size of Reddit.

So yes.

I guess that’s a fair point, but there are a few things I’d point out in response.

For one thing, nested threads weren’t that rare, even early on. I refuse to give Reddit credit for that one. Pair that with the fact that around here the upvote sorting is far less relevant and you have a more forum-like arrangement. It’s definitely not the “only the most upvoted post counts” thing over here. You have very long threads with a lot of different responses and responses to responses. The filtering and bubbling up based on popularity is not quite Reddit-like.

For another thing, and perhaps more importantly, social media isn’t just defined by its features. Reddit is the way it is because of how people engage with it and how large and anonymous it is. The entry points are different, the connections are different, the reliance on discoverability tools is waaay different. This place doesn’t feel like Reddit because even if it has a few of those tools it doesn’t much need them. You can parse the entire firehose. You can’t be Reddit like that.

If anything I’m surprised by the constant Reddit comparisons, because this has never felt like Reddit to me.

It feels like a 90s forum. Small, focused on a handful of topics, you always argue with the same five guys about the same five things… It’s not a Reddit replacement at all. Which is why I’m here, I don’t contribute to Reddit and never have.

You might not care about it, but a lot of us do. Nobody is trying to convince you to stop using Plex, we’re just trying to explain why we really do not want to use it ourselves

No you are not. This thread straight up opens on “why would anybody use Plex” and this whole branch is about how people don’t want anybody using Google for login.

You are presenting a lot of great hypotheticals and I’ll be happy to stop using Plex if and when they stop being hypotheticals. They are, though, so I don’t particularly mind.

Especially because we’ve moved from “oh, maybe get your family to not use Google to log in” to “actually, get them to move to F-droid or install from source and do so under proper DNS filtering to stop telemetry gathering”.

Friend, if people’s relatives were willing to install their Plex client from source they wouldn’t need anybody to host a Plex server for them. What the hell are you going on about and how detached are you from how people use software?

I swear, online… man, “posers” is so harsh, but I can’t find a better word. They always pretend they are running some top secret off-the-grid operation like big corpo is coming after them specifically. Your data is probably not that tightly kept (mostly because a bunch of it probably doesn’t depend on you) and it’s not that much of a priority.

Oh, and while I get that you get a kick of repeating what your understanding of US law is at me, over here backing up to additional media is explicitly supported by the right to private copy. As is, implicitly breaking DRM.

Not that it matters because nobody is enforcing these at individuals for private use anyway because the rules being sought are absurd and holders know it and they just want scary tools to wave in front of individual users and to actually deploy against major sharers. You are playing out this weird scenario where a company goes to Plex to get your name as if Plex doesn’t have a business built on helping you do the thing you think they’re chasing you for and has a ton more money they could be sued for. It’s nonsense. The reality of it is it makes you feel cool and savvy to secure your home computer as if it held state secrets.

And that’s fine, but don’t act like anything else is insanity. It’s kind of obnoxious.

Well, if you have an issue with people knowing you use Plex at all, then… tough luck, because I hate to tell you this, but a media server needs a client and it’s a vanishingly small group of people that will use either Plex or Jellyfin clients and not let Apple, Google, LG, Samsung or whatever other device is running the client software that this is happening.

I give zero craps about whether Google knows I or anybody else uses Plex via their login because they already know this form the Google Play Store, along with the manufacturer of every TV we collectively own.

And for the record I do not live in the US and the way their absolutely idiotic copyright loopholes apply here is very much in question. It doesn’t get tested in court much because the times it has been it didn’t go particularly great for copyright holders. Private copying owned media is a right regulated by law here and I will continue to do so. If a corporation wants to deliberate with our local courts whether my owning a drive that happens to not be super picky about on-disc DRM I don’t have anything particularly intense going on this week.

Ironically, in our own dumb legal implementation we are allowed to back up movies but there is a carved exception for software, so making a copy of a game you own is a bigger deal. Go figure.

Yeah, you kinda got to the breakdown in this conversation. Google sure knows that you’re using Plex.

That is not a concern, though. Plex is a perfectly legal piece of software.

I think people are taking me saying “Google doesn’t know what you’re streaming with Plex, but Plex does, so that’d be a bigger issue” as irrelevant because they assume Plex is itself a liability, which it isn’t.

It’s weird how corporate copyright assumptions have seeped to the mainstream and people assume that anything you do with your owned media is illegal unless you’re paying somebody.

I don’t know that Google gets to log your access in that scenario, Plex is just using their login system.

Plex sure does know, though, whether you log in via Google or not, so “I don’t share videos using google to log in” is still a bit of a weird statement and not the reason you’d be worried about your piracy habits.

Incidentally, if a friend or family member is hosting a service and “tells me these are the options to sign in to the service I’m hosting” I’d tell them to go away, which is something my own relatives have done to me a bunch when my proposed self-hosted alternative isn’t perfectly smooth and just as convenient as the corpo alternative.

Not surprisingly, the only two selfhosted things my family has ever used are Plex and Home Assistant.