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How do you handle family requests that you disagree with?

Interesting problem here. So I self host jellyfin, happy to share my (owned) movies with my family. Well, my mother has asked me to digitize her collection too and have me host it. Originally, fine, you give your movies to me, I host them, same thing.

However, what I didn't bet on was the amount of garbage, terrible movies she would give me. There's a few that are fine, but the vast majority are, well I'll just put it bluntly, christian propaganda. I don't think any of them are as terrible as some of the worst case, but think "My life was horrible until I found god now look and see how fulfilled I am" type propaganda - and they make for horrible plots. Left Behind with Kirk Cameron is a good example. Even removing the blatent boring christian plots - it's just a horribly made movie. Cheap, not thought out well, and honestly I read the book decades ago, it's a horrible adaptation too.

Not that I keep only top tier movies in my libraries, but these are, well they just bring a pit to my stomach.

What would you do in my situation? (And I'm going to go ahead and say the pure atheist comments aren't needed, yes of course I could burn them, or dance around them, but I'm not looking to just burn the bridge between my mother and myself over a lifetime of her indoctrination and bad taste in movies). I'm more looking for generic, how do you handle your users asking you to put content you don't find appealing on your server?

72 comments
  • If its just for her, I don't really care what content I host for family unless it straight up nazi/gay hate shit. New age "found christian" movies are massive yuck, but innocuous otherwise. She's gonna consume them regardless of whether you host them or not.

    Move it to its own library, make sure to rip in low quality (480p low bitrate) so you're not spending too much disk space in her, and let it be. It's not worth driving a rift in the family over.

    • Good level headed reply, I like this. Others have suggested that as well, I'll move the crud over to her own library, then it doesn't pollute my main library and I can hide it from the others.

  • It was a mistake to agree to that. Also I don't see how the types of movies change a thing

  • For my wife, I have a separate library folder, mapped to just her account in Plex. It doesn't appear in my library at all, so I don't really care. Even better, I've spun up an Overseerr instance for her, so she can just search and auto-add anything she wants for herself.

  • "No."

    User requests come through ombi and I'll reject whichever ones I feel like. No explanations, I just don't.

  • Troll mode: Rip the first 5 minutes of each movie then splice in Rick Astley

    Troll activist mode: Rip the first 5 minutes of each movie then splice in Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion live reading

    Troll comedian mode: Rip the first 5 minutes of each movie then splice in Monty Python's The Life of Brian

    Activist mode: Find a set of movies to rename that teach about the harm religion has caused

    Ethical absolutist mode: Refuse to host them, and explain why

    Non-confrontational familial support mode: Give Mom a unique user and make the god movies only accessible to that user

    In all seriousness it depends on what your priorities are. Is it more important to you to provide judgement-free support to your mom so she knows she can rely on you, or is it more important to try to reduce harm in the world by deplatforming harmful media? Or maybe it's more important to try to teach your mom what's wrong with those movies and you can come to an arrangement where she can watch those movies only if she agrees to watch movies you choose in equal amounts (since you can track it) to counteract the propaganda?

    What is most important to you?

  • I'd say a good middle ground could be making that stuff only visible from your mom's user (or even setting up a completely separate server)?

    It depends on what YOU want to do, really... personally, I would be ok hosting religious nonsense if asked, as long as it's not generally available in kids' accounts and stuff (also, porn), but I would come clean and outright refuse if it was neonazi,racist and/or conspiracy stuff. It depends on where you decide to draw the line.

    BTW: there's also the passive/aggressive, cowardly option of sayng "I'll rip them when I have time" and then sequester all the DVDs and only ever find the time to rip the ones you don't mind

  • Host it exclusively to her user or don't host it at all. If you're not going to host it, you know your mother better than any of us, so you'll know which approach would work better.

  • Ive not shared mine to the point anyone can arbitrarily get media. They have to ask. And I can always say “Oh its not available on my sources” or whatever

    • hindsight is 20/20 there, yeah, wish I hadn't done this. To others, this is the best approach, don't accept it in the first place

  • I personally believe that preserving a false and misleading picture of reality designed to trumpet a deranged cult that is working to make the world objectively worse for everyone including themselves is not acceptable.

    I would say, "Look mum I love you more than anything in the world but preserving some of these movies crosses an ethical line for me."

    Of course I grew up in a house of atheist jewish academics, so making and justifying personal ethical stances that contravene wider group stances is expected behavior in my family. And we take document preservation fairly seriously.

  • It's my library. I only approve shit that I want to be on there.

    My users know this (including family). If they want to be picky they can run their own shit. I've denied plenty before.

    An alternative answer is to "approve" it in overseerr, but remove the request in radarr. Or setup a blacklist for the name. Then just say that the tools can't find the movie, nothing you can do about it.

  • If you agreed to host her collection carte blanche, that's your failure to manage expectations.

    The better approach would have been to make an X GB partition (whatever you're comfortable allocating) say there's a specific amount of space available for family use. When it fills up it fills up.

  • You can use this as an opportunity to have a conversation about what it is about those movies that she likes. This could open up to a larger conversation where you can connect and grow your relationship as mother and child. Or she might just say something vague and simple and you can ignore the movies while they sit in a separate library.

  • I loooove bad movies. Not religious-bad, more mystery science theater bad.

    I rip everything and plunk it into it's own library just for me.

    If you have the space and time, go ahead and limit access to her. She's already seen them or will anyway. You hosting a file for one individual isn't going to tip the grand scale of anything.

    If you have a moral issue against it, don't host the content. You've already made up your mind, it's just taking you a while to realize it.

72 comments