I’ve always had this like 70% formed idea about Plex and how it’s indicative of how people want to self host more than we realize, but I’ve never quite been able to articulate what I’m thinking here and what the larger implications are.
Plex is obviously not true self hosting, but it’s a lot closer to it than a Netflix subscription, and the number of people who I do not consider very tech savvy who have not only been joining other people servers but trying to set up their own is staggering lately. And they’re not simply doing it because they want free movies or something. A lot of them have done it for the same reason I initially started: their kids.
I am concerned about the media that is put in front of my kids. I care about what shows they are watching. Kids are going to get their hands on screens there almost is no getting around it, so I would rather not trust YouTube et al with deciding what my kids do and don’t see. I can’t realistically be there to catch literally everything they watch, but if they’re using my server I know they only have access to a certain Library at all times so I can rest a lot easier. In a lot of ways I imagine this is how our parents felt when we were kids. On cable television growing up there were only so many “weird” or troubling things that could pop up, definitely nothing as extreme as we see today, and you could be reasonably aware of what most of those things were and know what channels to forbid/what times your kids should not have free access to the TV.
I found a lot of other parents feel the same way here. They’re just tired of feeling like the Internet is such an incredibly hostile place and want to find ways to take a little power back into their own hands.
I don’t know hopefully something useful popped up in that rant above. I have a lot of disjointed thoughts about this I really haven’t been able to bring together.
Yup that’s why I started self-hosting, when my wife got pregnant and we started to think about what technology access for our future kids would look like.
I started with CasaOS and Jellyfin. Quickly outgrew Casa and moved to learning Docker and setting up my own container stack, moving from media self-hosting to adding new containers of stuff like budgeting apps. I’m still working on building out my server but every container I add, the goal is basically to self-host a version of something I’m doing on a centralized service on the web and ultimately take my data and privacy back.
I will say some peoples’ elitist attitudes about stuff can be annoying and discouraging; it’s the same general spillover attitude from the Linux supremacy crowd. When I started with Casa I had someone basically tell me I was wasting my time and if I wasn’t running everything in VMs why bother. Which is entirely the opposite attitude to get “normies” and low technical literacy people on board, they need easy one-click install solutions like CasaOS. And if they decide to move onto something more complex, well I’m sure they can figure out how to reimage and rebuild their server in ProxMox or Docker as part of that.
I've been "self-hosting" for 30 years now (= running a 24/7 linux server)
And I still don't get the "VM for everything" crowd. Why would you do that when you have containers?
It's much simpler and lighter. Any 200€ old corporate PC can run a dozen containers easily. What it can't do is run that same stuff in 12 VMs.
Ha we basically had the same journey though you are certainly further along than I am.
Definitely agree about the elitist attitude problem. The amount of people who dunk on people for using Plex when I think it’s a fantastic jumping off point for true self hosting…it’s just so unnecessary and becomes a missed opportunity.