I have a Jellyfin server, NextCloud instance, etc that I share with friends and family. Currently, I serve them over the open-internet using Cloudflare tunnels. Obviously this has some security implications that I don’t love. Also recently one of my domains got flagged as malicious by google and now Chrome browsers won’t go to the site - annoying.
I use Tailscale already to access my server infra remotely, but honestly I don’t see this as a viable option for my non-technical friends and family. Plus, I need to support all kinds of devices like smart tvs. How do you fine folks deal with this issue?
I don’t. I let people use Netflix, Dropbox, or whatever. Those are made for non-technical users, have 24/7/365 monitoring and support, it seem to be what most people actually want, and they have teams of people for device support (or the individual user can find a service that supports their devices).
Any time I’ve tried to show friends or family some cool thing I setup that they can use, they don’t actually want it and I feel like I’m forcing it on them; they are just trying it while I’m there to be nice. So I don’t bother anymore.
Not to mention I don’t want to deal with the inevitable support calls, or oddly worse, hearing through the grape vine that it hasn’t been working, but they didn’t tell me, so I feel like an ass because this thing I told them was great isn’t working for them and they think it’s their fault, or don’t want to be bother me, or whatever.
Friends and family are nice. In my experience they react like “wow amazing, how much you pay for that?” But they actually mean “wtf dude you never heard of netflix?” (:
I set up everything behind Authentik SSO so that, when they ask me to set them up with jellyfin to watch movies & tv, they suddenly have access to a whole suite of tools. That way, they can explore on their own and decide - which seems to work well. Not sure what kind of users you have, but mine are very quick to ring me up when something is not working!
I’m quite terrible at keeping up with folks, and so I find these support calls to be a great way to keep in touch actually! But I could definitely see it getting annoying too.
As much as I like fully self hosting, I ended up paying for Plex lifetime and have it running in docker. It was $120, but has already paid for itself twice over since I managed to convince my wife to drop hbo max, Netflix, and a couple others. She isn’t technical at all so she was hesitant, but she likes plex. If she can’t find what she wants to watch on our few streaming services (paid for by our cell provider, otherwise they’d be cancelled too), she can add it to the watchlist on Plex and radarr or sonarr will download it automatically and make it available on plex pretty quickly (or she’ll tell me to get it and let her know when it’s done).
I could open my Plex server to more family or friends, but most of them either pirate stuff themselves or are fine with paying for streaming services for the ease of use.