i have a collection of media i want to share on a request basis, i.e give specific people access to the full collection on request, but i’ve never hosted any service open to the wider net, so i’m quite wary of any potential risks, mainly getting a letter from my isp for uncommon data usage or opening my network to any security risks, as i share it with other people and don’t want them to get affected in any way.
i’m aware the best choice for anyone overtly worried with security would be to upload it all to a cloud service, but due to my currency’s exchange rate to the dollar most services are unfortunately out of my budget.
creating a site for it would be a good option, but some of the items in the collection could cause copyright issues that could get the site taken down if reported.
any help/ideas are greatly appreciated, as i’m kinda out of them at the moment
Are these people you trust? I would do Jellyfin and expose it to them via tailscale. Might be annoying for them to have to run tailscale but no chance I’m serving media directly from my house.
mostly yes, due to the topic and where the link will be shared i can’t imagine there’ll be any intentional bad actors, though there’s always a chance. jellyfin would be perfect, but one of the most important collections is a series of periodicals/magazines that afaik aren’t supported natively or by any plugin.
What format are they in? Jellyfin does support some of the common eBook formats. https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/books
Check out ZeroTier or Tailscale. Either one of these options would be your best bet.
good idea, i’ll check them out
I run Jellyfin for myself and I like it. It’s certainly capable of supporting multiple user accounts with password login. Not sure if there’s anything about it that would make it more or less secure than any other method. I would definitely consider giving friends and family free access, but everyone I know seems pretty content giving their money to the various streaming services. Oh well.
I’m trying to talk a lot of friends into using my. Jellyfin and even helped them set up tailscale and all that. But they keep going back to paying Netflix etc.
i love jellyfin, only thing holding me back from using it for this project is that it’s very focused on video, and a huge part of the content i wanna share is text-based
Ah, okay. What about just a simple static webpage with a .onion address? Is your audience savvy enough to use Tor?
You probably just want NextCloud then
Maybe Plex or Emby?
Unfortunately I don’t have a single host solution (beyond a reverse proxied ftp). But I use plex to host music, audiobooks, movies and TV and Calibre, Calibre-web for text based materials.
Plex, expose port 32400, require encryption.
If pre-built media server solutions doesn’t work for your use case, then you’d need to create a custom site.
For the most part, ISPs tends to care more about:
- Covering their butt legally — if they don’t know you’re engaging in anything like piracy, then it’s not really their concern; and
- Ensuring their network stability — if you’re within your contractual usage limits and not using disproportionate amount of traffic causing other customers problem, then your network security is your problem.
As such, as long as the intended sharing audience are limited to only people you trust, and you put the content behind authentication w/ encryption (I.E. https), no one other than the intended recipient would know what you’re sending over the wire. That is as long as none of your users leak their credentials/report you for the content you’re sharing… which, a media server solution wouldn’t protect you from either.
