ITT

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.
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ITT

"But my parents can't use a VPN!!"
Was that line in the sand drawn before or after footing the bill, installing a media server, and an entire arr stack?
Their house is right there, bro.
Plex prices are expensive just to access your own media. Tailscale can do it for free.
Tailscale isn't exactly free. It requires a lot more knowledge, configuration, maintenance, etc, than Plex alone.
Sure, many self-hosters have the ability to figure it out and the proper networking and/or server hardware to implement it. But many Plex users aren't really self-hosters in that sense. Hosting a local media server that deals with all of the networking stuff for you is much easier than maintaining a tailscale or similar setup on top of the media server stuff. I mean for me, if I hadn't gotten a lifetime Plex Pass early on for cheap, I probably would have put more effort into my Jellyfin setup. But Plex mostly just works and I have other bigger priorities. I hate the functionality they've removed that makes things more difficult than it should be, or I wouldn't be switching, but it's not all that bad. So if I didn't have the expertise and hardware already, I could see it being worth the money to stick with it.
You just made those words up.
/s