- It’s a commercial product, what else could you expect?
Should be a full stop with “profit”. All the shitty things that go with companies chasing it.
If they were going to get enshittified, they should’ve been smarter about it to gradually introduce lock-in. The switching cost of going to Jellyfin is almost zero. Did it in an afternoon about a year ago. Ya done goofed, Plex
One reason: It’s not FOSS, and because of that, it’s not protected from the Capitalist profit motive that’s always pushing the creators/owners towards enshitification.
The same forces act upon FOSS too, but the difference is that FOSS has structural immunity built into it. If the software enshitifies, it can be forked and maintained by a community that values software freedom.
We’ve seen it happen time and again. Terraform, CentOS, RHEL, The Xen Hypervisor, etc. When companies try to take freedom away from FOSS, they fail, because their users and maintainers are empowered by FOSS licenses (especially restrictive ones like the GPL) and can fight back.
With proprietary software, the users are powerless, only the owners have control.
Don’t trust promises, good intentions, or corporate slogans. Trust free software and the open ecosystems they thrive in.
PS, Jellyfin is amazing ❤️
I just need Jellyfin to fix their subtitles issues on Apple TV and I’ll be all set. Swiftfin needs some work yet, though I’m told the fix is in the pipeline for release soon^™ (probably by Q1 next year?).
The thing it replaced… XBMC? O_o
Xbmc was renamed Kodi and it’s still revenant. It has a totally different use case than Plex or jellyfin and there’s plugins for both.
Clients suck on non plex
I’m going to call it like I saw it, a very long time ago.
<rant>
You have a product that is basically purpose built to make data hoarding and piracy practical, yet it requires a login with a central service. I don’t care what justification anyone thinks makes that worthwhile or even a good compromise. Signaling to any corporate entity that you’re in possession of such a thing is a bad idea to begin with. They shouldn’t even know you exist. That information, along with anything else you do with the product is compromising to you and can be sold for money if aggregated with everyone else’s data.
If you find this rant out of place in our modern world, I’d like to point to the concept of shifting baselines. This didn’t used to be normal and nothing short of greed continues the behavior. The technology before this ran/runs without anyone knowing. Consider VLC, or XBMC.
Jellyfin is a complete replacement for Plex
Goodness, how am I supposed to store and stream more entertainment than I could watch in a lifetime now?
Meh, I went into plex settings on the server and just turned off all the bloat. Its all on one page. Not a big deal.
I went into no settings on Jellyfin and everything stayed sane and the same.
Sure, but you also don’t have the option to use those features because they don’t exist in jellyfin.
In my plex instance, I have discover enabled, and enabled all the streaming services so that discover is populated with all the movies and shows available. Then I have an automation setup so I can search in discover for a movie, and add it to my watchlist, and my automation will automatically download that movie and add it to my library.
I can do it right from my couch, and its WAF approved. Using those bloat features against them, in a way.
But, its just as easy to turn those all off if one doesn’t want to utilize them. I’d be annoyed if they forced them on permanently but that’s not what plex does, but they sure get a lot of hate for just having those features.
whoa, you mean you don’t want ads?? what is happening?!
Where do you get ads from on plex!?
i count as all the streaming shit they try to push as ads.
What about the limits on remote streaming unless you pay?
I purchased a lifetime sub when it was on sale
Same, I’ve paid once, 12 years ago, and imo it was worth supporting them.
Yeah, Plex wins there - lifetime subs for Jellyfin never seem to be on sale.
I never felt comfortable with Plex, glad I’ve got JellyFin.
FYI, they never capitalise like that. It’s always Jellyfin, not JellyFin. They actually have a policy detailing it.
Indeed. Seems every week Plex takes some action to enshitify their service more and more.
I prefer open source, but if I’m buying proprietary software, let’s do it fairly and sustainably. Don’t charge me a 1-time fee and then enshittify what I bought because your business model isn’t working. On the other hand, don’t charge me multiple times for the same software with a subscription. The most fair arrangement to both of us is to sell perpetual licenses for a specific version and then charge me for major updates. If your newer versions introduce massive improvements, then I might give you more money. It’s also fair to do free upgrades for a period of time and then charge for major upgrades. Finally, don’t force me to use your software always online and if you must have an activation process, provide a way to activate from a different machine by uploading an activation file or whatever.
It’s sad but at least it’s still competition where desperately needed.
Capitalism.
Yeah, only one reason. It’s always capitalism.
Enshitification has entered the chat
Not in this case. “Getting shitty” and “enshittification” are different.
I hate headlines like this. I’d love to hear the REASONS WHY Plex are doing all of this. But no, it’s just “4 ways in which Plex now sucks” which we all know already.
Before someone says “the reason is money” we need to ask: do the developers of Jellyfin not use money? Why won’t the same thing just happen to them too?
Before someone says “enshittification,” we need to ask: does this mean Jellyfin will soon have the same problems?
We all seem to love Jellyfin so I think we need to understand the actual reason why, or this will just continue happening.
Plex took a significant degree of other people’s money, to the tune of over 40 million dollars. The people who gave said money were not kickstarter funders, donators, subscribers, etc but investors, who have an expectation that plex will move the company in a direction that makes them profitable enough to not only repay the 40+ million investment, but to then earn profits for a lengthy period (possibly in perpetuity) as they are stakeholders. This is the same thing that happened to Reddit (though Reddits scale and timeline was FAR more vast), openai, Google, literally every company ever basically. Plex now has an obligation to not just continue development but to continue it in a way that maximizes growth and revenue, even if that is anti consumer.
Jellyfin on the other hand has language on their contributions page that almost discourages financial support. This is because the only financial support they accept is donations, which are clearly explained are to support the free software and give no ownership stake. The software does not generate profit and donation does not equate to any kind of investment, other than supporting continued development. Expecting any kind of return on your part (again, other than the project continuing to move forward) is foolish. Lemmy is similar, as are many other FOSS projects. Jellyfin can remain ideologically stable to its goals, and because it is free if its users feel the lead developers are straying from this they can fork it and make “new ideologically pure jellyfin” (see xmbc to plex to emby to jellyfin, or lemmys 938 forks, many of which are tweaks and some of which are because people got beef with the main devs)
Here you can see, what they do with the momey:
https://opencollective.com/jellyfinPlex is a private company…
I hate headlines like this. I’d love to hear the REASONS WHY Plex are doing all of this.
- Greed… do you really need 3 more?
Before someone says “the reason is money” we need to ask: do the developers of Jellyfin not use money? Why won’t the same thing just happen to them too?
Plex is a private company wanting money… Jellyfin is a voluteer-drive effort
Before someone says “enshittification,” we need to ask: does this mean Jellyfin will soon have the same problems?
Enshitification happens to privately develop products due to <checks notes> greed… Jellyfin is not a private company pushing a product for profit
We all seem to love Jellyfin so I think we need to understand the actual reason why, or this will just continue happening.
Back to “greed”
plus jellyfin is open source. if they start enshittifying, people can just fork it. That will keep them in line. Look what happened with emby. They’ve been sent to oblivion and no one even talks about them anymore.
As predicted, a one-dimensional answer.
Let’s say they want more money: they do have a healthy software subscriptions business. How can they get more by becoming the world’s tiniest streaming service? And won’t that cannibalize their subscriptions business as the experience gets shittier and shittier?
Some actual “whys” within this would be things like (made up, but for example)
-
the subscriptions business is dying - less than 1% of users ever buy a pass and efforts to increase that failed for (another reason here)
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streaming services are dumping cash into viewer acquisition because a war is on for dominance in that space and Pled is capitalizing on that
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Plex has high overlap with gamers and are making good money on midroll gaming ads during these streams
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Plex has legal concerns about facilitating piracy - this is the real reason why sync is shit and they killed watch together. They are desperately trying to pivot out of their old business before they get sued - OR all this streaming nonsense gives them a kind of fig leaf over that somehow
See, issues can be complex and interesting. Just calling them greedy is neither. How is this the greedy play, even?
Nobody outside Plex’s finance department is going to have what you’re looking for if those examples are anything to go by.
What it comes down to is they have $130M that investors are going to want back and all the decisions they’re making now are aimed at doing so. That doesn’t mean any of those decisions are good or are going to work. It didn’t even mean they won’t backfire and have the opposite effect.
Anyone who has knowledge of or works in any areas adjacent to any of these could provide some kind of insight. Fuck me for wanting some grownup conversation about why businesses do the things they do, instead of a circle jerk of hating on mustache-twirling villains.
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Plex has been off limits to me for along time. Just the fact they want to require auth with their central service for something I use for reasons rights holders would love to sue me into third world poverty over (muh Linux ISOs) is enough reason.
Them demanding that auth hook into the server makes me uneasy about what sort of metatdata they are currently, or could exfiltrate later on, should they want to or be demanded to.
Whole thing stinks of willingly being part of a honeypot.
There’s only one reason, money.
But it’s at least four $1.
