But what made it more accessible and easy to access places like Facebook in the first place? Smart phones.

I personally blame the iPhone. Shit all started going downhill from then

The last time I tried out cosmic it was still quite new and lacking a lot of the customisability of gnome + tweaks. That could have changed by now tho

I’ve been doing a bit more research and it looks like the way to go is jellyfin + a cloudflare DNS tunnel. Also there appears to be a native jellyfin app on most Android TVs available. So, no, VPN or a web browser is not required at all

Can’t you just open the URL in a web browser tho?

Not quite, I’m a software engineer that was literally a support technician before this role and I’m the go-to tech support person for my friends. Most of the complexity is on the hosts end ~ https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tailscale-funnel

But tailscale gets around that by creating a secure external tunnel that allows others to connect to your inside from anywhere in the world?

But when you want to give access to others outside of your network they need to subscribe to a plan to get a watch pass. That’s the main issue a lot of people are facing.