I agree with you, however Jellyfin is not intrinsically more secure than any other piece of software. You have to be very careful how you go about deploying it if you open up external access, as you are dependent on the Jellyfin devs to fix vulnerabilities and they aren’t actually being paid to do this. If you’re paranoid about privacy, you should be paranoid about this too; the people sending subpoenas aren’t above port-scans on ISP subscribers, they did it back in the early days of torrents.

You get control and privacy, but you also get responsibility. It’s a trade-off, and one I’d certainly make if Jellyfin were more mature. That’s just me though, I’ve been hosting my own stuff for about a decade now and I can set up an isolated environment for Jellyfin to run within. Plex is a lot more newbie-friendly and I’d still recommend it for most folks unless they for sure know what they’re doing.

As an aside, these concerns are common to all FOSS software that don’t have deep-pocketed backers. Jellyfin is likely never getting those, unfortunately. I hope they can find some other way of sustaining themselves, they’ve not got much money for the scale of development needed and it’s all volunteer-driven today.

https://opencollective.com/jellyfin

I want them to keep going, and I’ve even donated to them. I still don’t think it’s at a place to replace Plex for most people yet though.

Left a comment further down: https://lemmy.world/comment/13599910

Switching between wasn’t seamless, it kept forgetting where I left off on the last device, which was pretty annoying. Also, mobile/remote connectivity was spotty for me. Never got to the bottom of that, but my best guess is Plex’s relay system makes up for a lot of random network issues. My best work-around was to add my phone to tailscale, but obviously that’s not a great solution and won’t work for a lot of devices.

Overall, my impression was that Plex is a lot more polished. I also bought a lifetime membership years ago, so I have no incentive to switch to something that isn’t better. Plex isn’t perfect, but it was still better than Jellyfin as of a few months ago. I honestly hope that changes soon, I have zero faith in Plex as a company.

I’m in the same boat as you. I’d love to switch but the user experience of Jellyfin is still pretty bad outside the most basic cases. If you have a media center PC, it’s fine, but if you want to be able to switch between several devices the way you can with Netflix, it’s quite poor.

Plex is slowly trending down and Jellyfin is slowly trending up. I hope Jellyfin outpaces Plex before the enshittification is complete, but it’s a steep hill to climb.

I wouldn’t shortchange how much making the barrier to entry lower can help. You have to fight Rust a lot to build anything complex, and that can have a chilling effect on contributions. This is not a dig at Rust; it has to force you to build things in a particular way because it has to guarantee memory safety at compile time. That isn’t to say that Rust’s approach is the only way to be sure your code is safe, mind you, just that Rust’s insistence on memory safety at compile time is constraining.

To be frank, this isn’t necessary most of the time, and Rust will force you to spend ages worrying about problems that may not apply to your project. Java gets a bad rap but it’s second only to Python in ease-of-use. When you’re working on an API-driven webapp, you really don’t need Rust’s efficiency as much as you need a well-defined architecture that people can easily contribute to.

I doubt it’ll magically fix everything on its own, but a combo of good contribution policies and a more approachable codebase might.