As the creator of that thread, and a Nextcloud volunteer, I can confirm that Nextcloud can absolutely be run without a VPN. That is exactly what it is designed to do, scaling to millions of users.
It is vastly more deployed, modular, enterprise grade, and battle tested. Running it is nothing like running Jellyfin.
By definition, you are a pirate for ripping your purchased physical media! One can only imagine the depravity of then hosting that content for others! Straight to jail!
It seems to depend on how you are granting access and have configured the server... if they have to setup VPN access in order to access Jellyfin, as opposed to logging into plex website.
Sideload in which appstore? Jellyfin requires adding functionality through plugins, instead of pre-bundling. Definitely something where more documentation and guidance would go a long way in helping us feel more confident in both using, and switching, to it.
I think the difference is Plex offers a web address you can use for logging into Plex and for sharing it with others. So, you get a friendly admin interface with oauth for logging in from other popular services as the Plex user getting setup.
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