I like Flauncher or ProjectIvy. I’m using the latter on the living room TV and it works great.

More or less. There aren’t as many bots, and everyone is generally aware of traditional Internet etiquette (i.e. don’t be an asshole). Lemmy also feels as homogenous as early Reddit: college-educated white people in western countries.

I started joining forums back in the late nineties and I’ve learned every place on the Internet is in flux. Things always change. Back in the day, stuff would happen like we would lose hosting because someone got sick of running a niche phpBB forum or the moderation team would change. When social media kicked off, changes were driven by money. Facebook was a big gaming platform in my college years (Farmville), which feels completely foreign to today’s Facebook.

The smaller the community, the more stable it is. Some of those 20-year forums still exist, albeit in a much more diminished state. If a site/platform gets popular, that’s when things can change quickly.

Lemmy has already changed since I joined and I’m sure it will become something different in the future.

Thanks everyone, I feel much better about moving forward. I’m leaning towards Proxmox at this point because I could still run Windows as a VM while playing around and setting up a new drive pool. I’d like a setup that I can gradually upgrade because I don’t often have a full day to dedicate to these matters.

MergerFS still seems like a good fit for my media pool, simply only to solve an issue where one media type is filling a whole drive as another sits at 50% capacity. I’ve lost this data before and it was easy to recover by way of my preferred backup method (private torrent tracker with paid freeleech). A parity drive with SnapRaid might be a nice stop gap. I don’t think I feel confident enough with ZFS to potentially sacrifice uptime.

My dockers and server databases, however, are on a separate SSD that could benefit from ZFS. These files are backed up regularly so I can recover easily and I’d like as many failsafes as possible to protect myself. Having my Radarr database was indispensable when I lost a media drive a few weeks ago.

Good catch, yes my drives are 12TB. My brain is still stuck in 2005. :)

I still use Plex because they offer the product I bought, an easy way to stream content on my devices. Others have technical or philosophical issues, which I totally understand. Plex is the easiest option for my situation as of now. It is working great for me and my family.

Nothing lasts forever so it’s good to realistic about the future. If I start having technical issues, it’s Jellyfin. If Plex doubles down on subscriptions, it’s Jellyfin.

If you’re like me, a lifetime Plex Pass holder, I would experiment with Nginx Reverse Proxy now so you understand how it works. I have Overseerr running through a reverse proxy now.

I think it’s a matter of when, not if, Plex will make a business decision that pushes me off their platform. It’s a company focused on profit and that’s fine. And it would be good to be prepared for the future.