Yeah, guy I know isn’t crazy about work, and was a sysadmin (now security). Burned right out. He bought the Plex lifetime for me, though, because I enjoy curating the library and he likes free streaming (and can afford it which I really can’t).

He mostly just answers questions for me (which is challenging because I’m really good at asking the questions that lead me to fully understanding, and those tend to be fairly specific) and explains things I don’t understand when possible. He doesn’t do any self-hosting (other than a coax-based tv channel that runs my Plex and nothing else), preferring to leave to to me to handle… says it’s too much work and too expensive to be worth it, even knowing fully the alternatives (ofc thinking like a sysadmin, he’s thinking raid5 and full servers and stuff whereas I just have an old-ish dedicated pc for that lol.)

Plus side, I’m learning a lot. Downside, learning this stuff while not having a strong tech foundation is hard!

My next foray is into automating my *arr, and setting up self-hosts for things like photos, comics, games, maaaaaaybe Lemmy, and music (Plex does ok with music tho, so maybe just adding last.fm to it will do the job. I don’t listen to music; the need is not my own, so I need something robust and host-hands-off)

He does help me with a few things I really don’t understand though, like complex tunnel/router configuration, setting up pihole (I can do that myself now) and hosting my home vpn (I could probably do this, but he does it for me for now with a custom domain) but it’s almost the exact opposite of what you described as the dynamic lol

Maybe I should be “that girl”, but I’d be tempted to snoop. Very very tempted. “Don’t trust me with your data” level of tempted.