I paid for the lifetime membership ~6 years ago so I'm going to stick with it. Plus I just use it for my own home. It's not like I'm serving a bunch of other clients. But I'll switch to Jellyfin if the lifetime membership ever gets taken away.
In a nutshell, if your app isn’t able to make a direct connection to your Plex Media Server when you’re away from home, we can act as sort of a middle man and “relay” the stream from your server to your app. To accomplish this, your Plex Media Server establishes a secure connection to one of our Relay servers. Your app then also connects securely to the same Relay server and accesses the stream from your Plex Media Server. (In technical terms, the content is tunneled through.)
So, your Plex Media Server basically “relays” the media stream through our server so that your app can access it since the app can’t connect with your server directly.
It's not a requirement to stream and it's sort of dumb they are lumping this relay service as a part of the remote streaming. Remote streaming should be allowed for free - if you are not a subscriber. The relay should just be a paid service, which makes sense. But if it's a direct connection to my server, it should be free.
That being said, I understand how Plex may have built some technical debt into this relay system. It might be hard for them to decouple the relay from the remote streaming. What they should have done is:
We are removing the relay service as a free service, but you can still do remote streaming with a direct connection.
And they should have built their architecture in a way that's easy to decouple the two services.
I agree with most of what you said but I feel like we are talking past each other regarding the whole payment processor piece. How do payment processors impact what ads YouTube plays before a video?
That's true for PC gaming but might not be true for these NUCs. I'm not an expert but I wouldn't be surprised if they shaved costs with bulk purchases of RAM and SSDs for these devices. Regardless, I was just addressing a point you made about being forced to buy the components yourself which isn't the case. Pricing is probably going to vary wildly depending on what you pick and you might be able to save money if you're ok with less RAM or less storage.
I think the issue is that these platforms are motivated by advertisers. I can build a Reddit clone in a weekend and have it be ad-free. It's not expensive to host text + urls - which was how old.reddit.com used to operate. It's basically a few dollars a month or I could host it out of my house for the cost of electricity (and security). And, without advertisers, I don't really care what I host so long as it doesn't directly contributing to harming others.
The main issues are:
No one wants to join a platform devoid of content
Once you reach a large enough platform that people want to join, it might require revenue streams to afford the scale
It's hard for people to even find platforms (Google will direct you to the top 5: Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok)
The modern infrastructure hasn't changed. It's still HTTP and servers. The problem is internet culture. We used to use the internet as an extension of our community. We could share links, forums, etc. in person (bizarre, I know). But now the internet is our entire community. And there is little drive to participate in niche communities. People like to be heard and to engage quickly on the internet which requires a large-ish platform (Lemmy is a good example of this).
You shouldn't have to pick it all separately. Some Nucs are "barebones" and others come with RAM, CPU, Storage, etc. This Amazon link purportedly claims to have RAM, SSD, etc. pre-built into the ASUS NUC.
That being said, any NUC's integrated GPU is likely going to be far superior to the RPi5's CPU encoding (which I assume was your previous setup).
If you want to spend ~$1000, you might be better off with just going straight for the dedicated NAS.
The app isn't available on as many platforms. The original comment claimed the TV their MIL uses doesn't have a Jellyfin app and would require side loading. I would argue that's a pretty big barrier for most people.
What does VISA sponsorship require? Maybe you could setup a farm/agrarian business and offer VISA sponsorship for migrants. As an American, I'd consider becoming a farmer with the opportunity to become an EU citizen lol probably not easy to do for a reason though.
I feel like solar farming was a good suggestion from someone else. Maybe plant some trees if you're not keen on making it a farm. If you can get it zoned, you might be able to get investment for residential? Though public transportation is lacking, maybe you could be the start of a small apartment complex or something like that. Idk much about this kind of thing.
I agree with you in principle, but they won't do it and you're likely going to end up struggling. There are other payment plan options that I encourage you to research before you end up in more debt which you can't offload. It's fucked up, I know. And I'm sorry you're having to decide between a payment or shelter. Obviously shelter comes first. But there might be other options to allow you to have both.
It always takes way longer to think about what to type than to type it out. So any benefits from speedier typing don't speed up the ultimate road block: our brains.
As someone who has been watching her Tiktoks for many years, it makes me happy.