Being a software engineer doesn't mean you want to spend you free time tinkering about your self-hosting setup and doing support for your users.
With Tailscale, not only you don't have to care about most things since _it just works_, but also on-boarding of casual users is straightforward.
Same goes for Plex. I want to watch movies/shows, I don't want to spend time tinkering with my setup. And Plex provides exactly that. Ditto for my family/friends that can access my library with the same simple experience as Netflix or whatever.
Meanwhile, I have a coworker who want to own/manage everything. So they don't want to use Tailscale and they dropped Plex when they forced to use the third-party login system. Now they watch less than a third than they used to be, and they share their setup with nobody since it's too complicated to do.
To each their own, but my goal is to enjoy my setup and share it with others. Tailscale and Plex give me that.
Choosing convenience is fine. But if basic port forwarding or WireGuard is beyond someone's skill set, "software engineer" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
I am not saying they are, but if it really is the case, then yeah.
As for file sharing... I remember when non-SWEs knew how to torrent movies, used DC++ and so on. These days even SWEs have no idea how to do it. It is mind-boggling.
The way I understand it is more like "without the ease of use provided by X, even though I could have done it, I wouldn't have done it because it would require time and energy that I'm not willing to put in".
Since we're talking about self-hosting, to me the main focus is not skill set but time and energy.
There's the same debate around NAS products like Synology that are sold with a high markup, meanwhile "every SWE should be able to make their own NAS using recycled hardware".
Sure. And I did all of this: - homemade NAS setup - homemade network setup - homemade mediaplayer setup
It was fun and I learned a lot.
But I moved to some more convenient tools so that I can just use them as reliable services, and focus on other experimentations/tinkering.
To be honest, the fact that you insist that Plex is just "file sharing" that can be replaced by torrents makes me think you either don't know what Plex actually is, or you are acting in bad faith.
1. The "unlocked" framing implies capability, not time preference
2. General technical literacy has declined: non-SWEs used to torrent, use DC++ extensively, etc.
I was not comparing Plex to torrenting. I was observing that basic file-sharing knowledge used to be common and now is not (see Netflix et al).
> time and energy being the focus
Sure, that is fair. But that is a different claim than "Tailscale unlocked self-hosting for me" which is how it is often framed.
But still, I insist that it's important to understand that, even if we share some similarities based on our interests/skills/work, we come from different backgrounds and have different priorities.
And part of the issue here is probably how people are framing things when they write about their experience. In tech, some of us are coming from a world of nerds where the norm is to be mater-of-factly, while some others are more extroverted and tend to put emphasis on random boring things.
Regarding this post in particular, I was more concerned about how the author was amazed by the fact that a 2025 computer could run 10 services in parallel... or that relying on a proprietary service (Claude) to manage all their setup was giving them "a strong feeling of independence".