For starters, they say “you MAY be affected” only once, maybe twice, and everywhere else they say you “will” need to buy the upgrade.

The whole thing could’ve been worded more carefully and cautiously. They know how their service is used, they know the majority of people with accounts are not hosts and never have been, and probably don’t even understand how it all works.

Not only could the whole message have been worded better, more softly. They could’ve used two templates. They have usage metrics, they could see that my user has never ever connected to any other library, only mine, and mine has always had Plex pass. They could’ve sent him a softball message, informing of the lost feature, sure, but assuring him that his service should remain unaffected because the libraries he’s connected to already have Plex pass.

But no. They sent one message, full of FUD, trying to scare people into buying what they don’t need, because money.

They do not care about users, they care about money. It’s been getting more and more clear over the years with no effort put into fixing bugs on the self hosted side. But now it’s crystal clear, to me anyway.

Same

It’s a very confusing and poorly worded email. My users were equally confused. Not everyone is techy or even deeply aware of how Plex even works. Nor should they be expected to.

The message was designed to confuse and extract money from people who don’t know better. It’s trashy and they should be ashamed.

That said, I’m still using Plex for the time being.

Can you elaborate? I’ve been trying to find a way to expose jf to the Internet safely without a VPN, and I’m getting mixed messages from people.

I just got a cloudfare domain the other day actually.

Yeah, odd response from this community. Entirely unexpected.

I plan on looking into it again, if nothing else than to have a backup when Plex finally does completely crap the bed.

Which I agree, this is pretty close, but I’m not there yet.

I’m glad you posted this because I thought I was alone too, I searched for and didn’t find anyone with this problem. Almost made a post here, but decided I didn’t want the abuse haha.

That’s good to hear. I honestly haven’t tried it yet, I need to. The problem is exposing it to the Internet without a VPN.

Clients don’t concern me, from what I understand it works on Roku and you can stream from your phone to a Chromecast, that’s all my users need.

I refuse to use any TVs built in smart features 🤷‍♂️

Public exposure to the Internet without needing tailscale or a VPN. I keep hearing mixed opinions on whether it’s recommended or not.

I’m not afraid of configuring it, reverse proxy and all that. I just want it to be secure, and I keep getting mixed signals.

For now I’ll keep dealing with Plex, but eventually I’m sure I’ll need to figure out a solution using jellyfin.

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.

For a reverse proxy, would cloudfare be sufficient?

This is what everyone always says, and yeah, for most people this is probably the most secure and easiest option. But for me it’s too much hassle for my family, too restrictive, and not at all what I’m looking for.

However in this thread I’ve learned that JF supports https, so if done carefully and properly, I can expose it to the Internet directly, which is what I plan to do. Eventually. Plex is still easier for now.

Thanks, you and others in this thread are the first people to ever tell me about this.

Everyone is always saying tailscale, but that’s too complicated and restrictive for my family.

I’m not afraid of port forwarding and dynamic DNS, I’ve played with it before. My main concern is just doing it safely, not exposing something to the Internet that wasn’t designed to be exposed. Security risk, and all that.

Obviously a VPN is the safest way. But as long as JF is reasonably robust and designed to be exposed, I’m happy with that. I just literally didn’t know it was designed that way.

Thanks!

Thanks, you and others in this thread are the first people to ever tell me about this.

Everyone is always saying tailscale, but that’s too complicated and restrictive for my family.

I’m not afraid of port forwarding and dynamic DNS, I’ve played with it before. My main concern is just doing it safely, not exposing something to the Internet that wasn’t designed to be exposed. Security risk, and all that.

Obviously a VPN is the safest way. But as long as JF is reasonably robust and designed to be exposed, I’m happy with that. I just literally didn’t know it was designed that way.

Thanks!

Thanks, you and others in this thread are the first people to ever tell me about this.

Everyone is always saying tailscale, but that’s too complicated and restrictive for my family.

I’m not afraid of port forwarding and dynamic DNS, I’ve played with it before. My main concern is just doing it safely, not exposing something to the Internet that wasn’t designed to be exposed. Security risk, and all that.

Obviously a VPN is the safest way. But as long as JF is reasonably robust and designed to be exposed, I’m happy with that. I just literally didn’t know it was designed that way.

Thanks!

The only problem is properly exposing jellyfin to the Internet. How do you do it?

I’m not planning on leaving Plex anytime soon. But I did plan on setting up jellyfin in parallel to play with it and learn about it. But this stopped me in my tracks.

I don’t want my family to need to VPN into my network. Plex, for as frustrating as it is in many ways, just works. And it works on so much stuff.