For the most part I feel very much at home on the Hachyderm Mastodon server; it’s probably the best social media experience that I can remember having and I have had the pleasure of interacting with so many cool and impassioned people there.

Hachyderm implements the default 500 character post limit which is hard-coded into the Mastodon codebase and as of writing these, seems unlikely to ever be made configurable.

Every now and then, especially when adding summaries to long (1hr+) live programming videos that I share across the Fediverse, I come up against that limit.

Before this week, it had been a long time since I visited the Plex subreddit.

I shared my last article there, which was a technical write-up of moving my Plex instance from a Hetzner auction server to a virtual machine running on hardware in my home network, and the considerations that influenced the migration.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that a culture of hostility towards even the mention of Hetzner or other cloud hosting providers has strongly taken root since Plex announced it’s blanket network ban on IP ranges associated with Hetzner data centers.

Last October, Plex started blocking access to instances running on servers hosted by Hetzner.

I have a Hetzner Auction server that I renew every year or so to make use of newer hardware, which I use to run various workloads, from web services, to scheduled jobs and self-hosted instances of privacy-friendly alternative web frontends like Nitter.

Another one of those workloads, until recently, was Plex.

I didn’t have the time to put too much effort into getting around the Hetzner network ban when it was first implemented, so I just started running Jellyfin instead. I even made a video demonstrating how easy it was to get Jellyfin up and running on a VPS.