Can you please refrain from personal attack, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are? and also please avoid denunciatory rhetoric? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

You obviously know a lot about this, and your comment contains fine information, but unfortunately the negative elements do more harm than the fine ones do good.

> You mean for the sharing library and streaming services and all the other features that require identification to even use

Plex is for streaming my media from my server to my clients. I know a decent number of people who use (or used) Plex and I don’t think any of them would ever use it to access streaming services.

I have no problem with charging for functionality that needs their servers, or introducing streaming. But the way their authentication, “services”, and streaming features hae been shoved in our faces in the UI over time feels like a rug pull to those of us who paid for something else.

Your response is both unnecessarily aggressive and plainly wrong.

Yes, Plex _should_ work without an internet gateway. Why? Because it’s a client/server media application; it transcodes media to clients/players over the network.

Plex used to work like this. Actually, it was exclusively unauthenticated. Then early 10s they added optional auth, and eventually allowed you to reserve “server names”, and finally enforced with for running their server. But you can still use a client without auth today. Just read their docs: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200890058-authentication-fo...

> 'For some reason'? You mean for the sharing library and streaming services and all the other features that require identification to even use ...?

All I wanted to do was self host a Plex server and access it from devices on my intranet using Infuse. Why should I have to bounce to a third party server to do that?

And to be clear, the devices using Infuse didn't have to do that, but accessing the dashboard (for admin) did require an external hop. There's no reason IMO for that to be necessary.

You're being a bit obtuse here yourself. The original premise of Plex was to stream your own media on your own network. I was a very early user of it, before these additional "features" that were pushed more by the Plex team than by user demand were added. They made it so you had to hack the xml config file to be able to use it in the traditional no login way, that was a pretty hostile move in my opinion and was the first eyebrow raiser for me. They also made it so you had to have a paid account to use any of the mobile clients in a clear monetization move there is no technical reason why you can't open your plex server to the internet and connect a mobile app that way, that's what jellyfin allows. I worked around this for a while by connecting to my home network on a VPN and just using chrome mobile to stream but it was less than ideal, obviously. Yes then they offered the proxying service with dynamic TLS cert generation as another paid for service, I remember it, but having never had a plex account let alone a paid one it was no interest to me. Do you work for Plex? Because your post reads like you do, especially the attitude of people not knowing what features they want and needing Plex to tell (sell) them.