Ada

All I read in these threads is effectively “WAAAH I don’t WANNA pay!”… Without realizing that the payment gave them something significantly more secure.

I’ve never used Plex, but the thing that stopped me from looking at it isn’t that it’s a paid service. It’s that it’s partially centralised, and starting to become hostile to its user base. This current change, locking down a previously free feature being an iconic example of that.

My partner and I fund two decently sized fediverse instances and a matrix instance mostly out of our own pockets. We do that precisely because we have both actively chosen to move away from centralised, user hostile social media platforms. And whilst Plex isn’t a social media platform, it is centralised and becoming more user hostile, and I won’t pay for that.

(And to be clear, I’m front of house, I’m not responsible for setting up our instances security :P)

Put it behind a reverse proxy!

I guess I haven’t noticed that. The non technically literate folk I know use smart TVs, or can download Jellyfin from an app store. Then they just use the URL when the app asks for it.

There’s no other configuring to do on their end.

As long as the technical person does all of the setup on their end, the non technical person only has to enter a domain and port in their jellyfin client.