Of course it’s subjective, but it was you who asked why people continue to use Plex. This is a reason, and the reason is valid whether you share the same experience or not.

Because Plexamp is by far the best music player I’ve ever used.

My comment, which you refer to, said nothing about NAT -or- firewalls. Rather, it’s a direct response to the second sentence in the article’s opening paragraph: “To the average computer user, the idea that someone could just… connect to your computer feels exotic, or even dangerous…”

You may be correct that nobody would recommend implementing IPv6 without a firewall. But this article avoids the subject of firewalls completely, which in combination with that opening paragraph leaves the distinct impression that we shouldn’t be concerned about it because that’s the way the internet was meant to be.

Of course this has nothing to do with NAT or IPv6, and the value of IPv6 can’t be overstated. But to ignore the security part of the equation is going to have one of two effects: 1) people who don’t know better will think they can use IPv6 without a firewall, or 2) people who understand the risks will be skeptical of the claims that IPv6 is better because you are leaving out an important part of the equation.

I read “Networking for Dummies” in 2005, and it gave me a GREAT baseline understanding. I don’t recall how much it discussed ipv6 at that time, but I imagine the newer editions cover it.

In the same way that the XKCD hand-waved FTP, this article hand-waves the idea that we shouldn’t be concerned about who can access our self-hosted services.

I’m not saying it’s wrong, but I’d like more of an explanation on why we shouldn’t be concerned about allowing anybody on the internet having direct communication with our computers.

Welcome fellow instance owner!

If you’re worried about that possibility, then you should mitigate against it. I’m not saying everybody should do it… all I’m saying is that rejecting the idea out of hand is not necessary.

I don’t feel like I’m risking anything… I feel like I have an understanding of the attack vectors and I’ve mitigated those to a level that’s acceptable to me.

Risk tolerance is something we all have to judge for ourselves.

Yup… HUGE difference between human curated machine learning and generative AI. AI sure is a buzzword these days, which is why it gets used in marketing, but I think doing so is confusing people who don’t know enough to distinguish between the different flavors of “AI”.

I don’t get this perspective. A reverse proxy pointing at containerized applications gives you plenty of buffer between the scary internet and your personal files. Don’t bind mount your entire host file system to the container, and only open/forward the ports you need.

There are things you have to get right, but there’s no reason to discard the idea altogether.