I have gotten into arguments here

Yes, that was the joke

is it a good thing for Home Assistant to provide a paid subscription service that will handle that for you?

There are so many differences between HA and Plex that it's almost difficult to pick which one is most significant. All i'd say is - if plex was at all the same as HA, I would have zero problem with it. If jellyfin adopted HA's model of paid development, I'd be thrilled. But HA's strategy is actually pretty unique, it'll take time for that structure to be stress-tested and propagate.

It does not need Google for anything here, having Google’s SSO doesn’t give them any information they already have.

Yea but not really - google accounts are usually pretty specifically identifiable to a person/ad account/collected internet and device activity. Might not be a big deal to you, but having those things tied together is problematic on a number of levels. You can self-host an SSO, and you can also have a security-focused third-party SSO - both would be marginal improvements over using google's auth system in terms of privacy.

It does give that to Google, but if your concern is the cops are going to bang on your door for all your illegal pixels that you stream then you’re just as boned. It’s borderline irresponsible to pretend otherwise.

Yes, 100%. If you're at all concerned about privacy, plex is a terrible idea, with or without SSO. I'm glad you agree.

How you get “I have nothing to hide” out of that is your own pretzel logic.

"What i'm doing is perfectly legal so it doesn't matter if they have my detailed data". You're not hiding it because you think you don't need to - that's exactly the argument you're making. Every step toward data privacy is valuable, even if your total data hygiene practice isn't perfect. It still matters.

I have a right to store, backup and access my own media and to keep a copy of it for private use

Good for you. Most of us do not.

I’m not keeping a media server performatively

Neither am I, but I guess I do feel quite passionately about keeping it private and I'm not shy about advocating for the practice. Probably for the same reason you're very tight lipped about what country you're from - you don't necessarily think you'll get swatted if you do, just that it's a pointless detail to share with strangers if you don't have to. Most of my family doesn't care enough about not using netflix or disney+ that they're happy to keep using them if my offering is too complicated. I'm happy to help them set up and learn how the server works if they're interested, and a number of them have become enthusiastic self-hosters themselves as a result. If I was operating a mission-critical service on my server then maybe i'd care more about minimizing UX friction but since it's not, I'm happy with prioritizing privacy and control over polish. That's a pretty common mentality for a server administrator - i'm not running a SAAS here. At most I'm just the enterprise IT manager trying to keep the office slack channel running.

For the record, I don’t have any misgivings about FOSS as a concept.

You can say that, but boy oh boy is that hard to believe. You certainly don't think FOSS is worth any level of inconvenience. Looks to me like you're the kind of person who wants the best tool for every job, regardless of if you could get by with a middling one that supports a FOSS project. That's fine. I use adobe products for work because I can't really get by without it, but I still use GIMP or Inkscape when I can and I support those ecosystems with my time and money because it draws more people in. And I actually do want my FOSS tools to be built as side projects, at least at first. There's a place for polish and professional support, but a lot of this stuff needs to be built out and tested before that kind of thing happens. A lot of these projects act as beta testing for forks that will end up doing one thing really well to a high level of polish. Having a product that's maybe a little complicated but extremely accessible from a configuration standpoint lets more tech-minded people build on top of them and work toward more polished solutions.

But I certainly don't find VC backed projects entering into the FOSS space as a good thing. Maybe that competition drives positive movement in the open-sourced ones, but usually they turn out to be 'embrace, extend, extinguish' projects. Like, I don't think meta's Threads is a positive thing for federated social media, even though by this logic they are making it 'more mainstream' by their adoption of activitypub. There just isn't a way to separate the product they produce from the economic model they operate under, and plex has chosen a model that inevitably leads to enshittification and walled-off content gardens.

I just don't see any reason to blow smoke for plex. Their UX is fine (great, even), but they're doing basically everything else wrong. They're reliant on VC capital, they're collaborating with private media and tailoring their TOS to protect copyright holders, they're collecting data they don't need and forcing features that reduce privacy, they're changing their privacy policies to enable data sales and monetization, they're bait-and-switching users by placing popular free features behind paywalls, they're banning lifetime paid users for perfectly legal use of their services.... the list goes on and on. At some point, a company like Plex crosses the line from 'reasonable profit-seeking' to 'actively user-hostile', and I think they've already crossed that line. Maybe you think their UX is worth the abuse, but I certainly do not - not when there's a perfectly fine alternative that fits my needs and more.