I never got the idea of selfhosting but paying (except for enterprise-grade support or donations) anyway.

Lol "Your Friends at Plex"

get fucked, assholes, Jellyfin is better anyway

Trying to monetize the piracy of your users. That's a bold business strategy.

Look, I know a lot of people could be using the sharing feature to share material that is in the public domain or that they own the copyright to, but let's be honest: most of that sharing would be considered an "unlicensed public performance" by the MAFIAA.

Seems like it was only a matter of time.

20% more will jump to Jellyfin. The other 80% will entrench and talk even more about how great Plex is. I mean Jesus, $250 to watch pirated movies. lol wtf It's also fucking wild to me that people are defending a monetization model that is on self hosted hardware. Like, I gotta pay for my server and then a license to avoid buying DVDs. Fuck it, at this point just buy the fucking movie.

Ya'll are brain dead. Plex loves you tho.

not a plex user but someone buried the lede here... to me, this is the neon sign that screams GTFO:

we noticed that you've accessed libraries in the past

what business of yours is it to notice my private comings and goings?! what other actionable intel do y'all keep in your logs?! bye!

Guess it’s time to start using jellyfin and contributing

Welcome to jellyfin!

Exhibit #46,853 for why freeware will inevitably fall out from under your feet and why you should exclusively use FOSS wherever possible.

EDIT: Here's Jellyfin's 'How to Contribute' page.

Oh no a paid, proprietary, piece of shit software does something shitty. Who could've ever saw this coming?!

I've said it for years anytime anyone mentioned running a Plex server. As soon as you install that on your server or your homelab it's no longer your server. Proprietary software is malware

I got the same email.

I haven't had plex installed for over 7 years, and I've NEVER used the shared libraries feature.

We noticed that you’ve accessed libraries from friends and family in the past

They've apparently noticed activity that's never occurred.

YES JELLYFIN! Thank you Plex for enshitifying!

I've only ever used jellyfin and have no complaints.

I avoided plex and went with jellyfill because it's free/libre software.

"On 21 May 2008, XBMC developer Elan Feingold forked the source code of XBMC and started a new project called Plex"

GPL v2 source.

They've long been suspected of being greedy lil GPL violaters.

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/2974

So as long as the server owner has Plex pass everyone's still able to stream from the server?

"your friends"

dude my friends don't charge me for shit

The more users on Jellyfin the better shot it has at getting more developer attention and users willing to contribute financially even if just occasional one off donation. How it goes with any open source application. More users, more developer interest, more feedback from users, subset of users willing to financially support the project

Jellyfin. Tailscale. Bob's your uncle.

My bad, this is all because I finally decided to purchase a lifetime pass.

I don't use Plex. I have never used Plex. But based on the one time I tried, this doesn't surprise me even a little bit.

Years ago I installed it on my NAS, it was a one click download package. I installed it and hit the button to set it up. And then it prompted me to make a cloud account.

Why do I need a cloud account? I am logging into my local server and I am not sharing anything with anybody nor am I subscribing to any cloud services. I have no need of a cloud account. But, the way they built the thing, you need a cloud account to log into your local system.

I did not create a cloud account. I uninstalled it. I concluded that a company that claims to care about user privacy, but requires cloud integration in an area that absolutely does not require cloud anything, does not actually give a shit about privacy. I Googled and found that the requirement for a cloud account was, at the time, a fairly new thing. Lots of people didn't like it. I concluded that this company was beginning to enshittify, although this was years ago and none of us had heard that word yet. But either way, it was obvious that the company was moving in a not customer-friendly direction and I did not want to be along for the ride.

My choice has been proven right several times over the years since. And yes, every time they remove a feature, or make some other customer unfriendly decision, I retell this story.

The moral here is that a company either cares about its customers or it doesn't, and it's usually pretty easy to tell which one fairly quickly. When one bad decision is made, and not corrected, others will follow.

Synology is the latest example of that. For anyone not paying attention, they have recently announced that their 2025 series units will only work with Synology branded hard drives, which are of course more expensive than standard Seagate or Western Digital drives (which work just fine). But if you look, the bread crumbs are there and form a trail. Over the last few years they have removed features, for example the device is no longer can decode h.265 surveillance video, and the units will no longer display SMART data for 'unsupported' drives. I say no longer because they used to, but an update changed that so they no longer do.

Bottom line though is don't do business with companies that don't respect you.

Thank you for posting this. I thought it was just me.

In my case, one user actually lost access entirely to my libraries, the updated app was trying to force him to buy a personal pass, even though I have a Plex pass.

I had him reset his app and clear cache, to no avail. I ended up having to REMOVE his access to my libraries, and then reshare them to him, before he could access them again.

He was quite upset at Plex during the entire process.

Then the next day, he got this same email, and was frustrated all over again thinking he was gonna have to fight it again.

Really terrible customer service here, very sloppy. Aside from the fact that this is a greedy cash grab, it's just being done poorly.

Jellyfin still isn't feature packed enough for me to switch to, unfortunately.

Friendship ended with plex, jellyfin is new best friend.

Playon, Evernote, Lastpass, there have been plenty of examples.

Whenever a company starts charging for previously free features, it's time to GTFO, even if you're on their pay side.

I've got lifetime Plexpass, but I can read the writing on the wall. It's only a matter of time before they enshittify my product or stop providing updates. They'll sunset Plex and start Plex+ or some shit, give em a year or so.

Get your Jellyfin installed and working, they can work beside each other. Tailscale if it's just you, reverse proxy if you have the fam on in.

Fuck them, glad I switched to Jellyfin years ago.

Dropped this for jellyfin years ago

This was announced several months ago

It seems like multiple things are being conflated here and I'm not sure what the reality is because I've never used Plex.

Some people claim this has something to do with Plex needing to pay for NAT traversal infrastructure. Okay, that seems sort of silly but at least there's the excuse that their servers are involved in the streaming somehow.

But their wording is very broad, just calling it "remote streaming." That led me to this article on the Plex support website, which walks people through setting up port forwarding in order to enable "remote streaming"! So that excuse doesn't really seem to hold water. What exactly is being paid for here then? How do they define what "local streaming" is?

As long as the library owner has a Plex Pass nothing changes for ANYONE who is streaming from that Plex Server.

That was announced 2 months ago?

I'll be honest, I thought Plex Pass was always a requirement for this 😅

This email is talking to you as a user of other libraries not yours, not as a server owner.

"Alternatively, server owners can purchase a Plex Pass, which will grant you continued remote streaming of libraries that you have been given access to."

As communicated previously, Plex pass users also get the benefit of the "Remote watch pass."

I'm coming up on 5 years as a Plex pass owner, so my users and I will not be impacted by this change. In five more years if they asked me nicely to pay another $89 to support the service I would. Send me some stickers and put a badge on my server. I get a lot of use out of the software/service, as do my family members.

I will say, I am quite annoyed at the wording and audience of this email. Jellyfin is just not an option for me until there is excellent feature parity with Plex. I know they are a lot of Jellyfin fans here, in my opinion, Plex is a significantly better experience for me.

It was only a matter of time. Plex is a Series C startup, employs 100+ people, and has taken substantial VC investment. Those investors are expecting exponential returns, and a "one-time lifetime payment" will never sustain that sort of growth