I’ve been thinking about this more and more. According to the sidebar, this community is “A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.” Based on that I don’t think Plex qualifies.
Privacy: Plex clearly records the metadata of what you watch. When I used it, it would send me a report by email of what my “friends” were watching. Even with that turned off, their services still track telemetry.
Control: Plex has all of it. They can (and do) make unilateral changes to the service, how authentication works, where you can run it, etc.
So I ask, when you are hosting something that is entirely dependent on a commercial entity to function, is Plex really selfhosting in the spirit of this community?
Yeah, to stretch OP’s definition to the limit, would you consider something self-hosted if it’s running on a Windows machine? Because even if the program is FOSS, Windows is a paid OS. How about Proxmox, an open source OS which is designed to self-host other things? Proxmox is open source, but paid. Where is the line in the sand for what is, and isn’t self-hosted?
I tend to take a more anarchic “if you set it up yourself, it’s self-hosted” approach to it. Even if the program isn’t FOSS. Even if it isn’t OSS. You had to go through the steps to get it to boot up. You had to go through the steps to acquire media for it if it’s a media service. You had to go through the steps of connecting peripherals to it if it’s something like Home Assistant. You had to go through the steps of getting remote access working if it’s on a reverse proxy. You had to go through the steps of getting the VPS configured if it’s running on a VPS. It’s being hosted on something you set up, (even if it’s a VPS that you’re not locally running) so it is self-hosted.