Likely not the solution you’re looking for but a buddy and i link a folder via syncthing and anything added to one side shows up on the other.

Most of that will be budget based and long term goal oriented. Do you want a 4 bay nas with 10tb drives set up in raid 5 or do you think you’d want a two bay system with 5tb drives set up in mirror raid? Do you want to start cheap and get a second hand thinkcenter off ebay or do you want to buy a brand new NUC and put a 2tb M.2 and 16gb of ram in one slot so you can add the other 16gb later? Some nuc can take up to 64gb of ram and have two 2tb drives in them.

To play off what others are saying i think a mini pc and a stand alone nas may be the better route for you. It may seem counter intuitive to break it out into two devices but doing so will allow room for growth. If you buy a creeper bare bones mini pc and put more of your budget towards a nas and storage you could expand the mini pc without messing with your nas. You could keep the pi in the mix for a backup if your main pc is down or offload some services to it to balance performance.

It’s a great software to run. I like to watch youtube tutorials that explain things step by step so i can understand what happens. If i find a good video i’ll see what other software that channel may have a tutorial on and if that software may interest me.

You could set up a dns based ad-blocker like pihole and a vpn like wireguard to tunnel your phone back into your home network so you have ad-blocking on the go, too. That’s a semi beginner protect with plenty of tutorials to pick from.

You could run nextcloud, syncthing, or immich to make your own cloud at home but that might need more than a basic pi setup.

Learning how to use your pi to run a reverse proxy to a self hosted blogging site would give you plenty of hands on starter experience. Run docker and portainer and mess with docker config files from a webgui to see what work and what doesn’t.

As a self taught self-hosting enthusiast i wouldn’t recommend ansible to a beginner. I know that sounds backwards as absible makes everything easy and does all the work for you but that’s also part of the problem. It would be like jumping behind the wheel of a self driving car without knowing how to drive at all. When (not if) something goes wrong it could go wrong hard and you’d lose the whole instance.

It’s better to start with some other self hosted projects that interest you to get a feel for the process and software like docker then work your way up to bigger things like lemmy. I consider myself fairly versed in the process and lemmy still gave me some issues to set up and my pixelfed instance still won’t federate despite my best efforts. I’m pretty sure i know the issue, i just need to get around to fixing it.

Last thought, the raspberry pi is a pretty impressive little pc for it’s size and price point but you might find yourself quickly burning through resources depending on the number of active users you have and how heavily you use it.

AudioBookShelf is a beautiful podcast option. OP would have to fully migrate into it but once done it’ll let you listen to an episode on pc, pause, then resume from the same spot on mobile. It’ll auto grab episode as they come out and store them on your system for streaming or local access. The android app is pretty good and i know webapp works well on ios

That goes hand in hand with a level of trust with some companies/people and everyone has different threat tolerances. It also highlights the mindset that you have no idea what the person on the other end of the message is doing with it. End to end encryption helps keep in line eavesdropping down but if the recipient of the message has a compromised device or are screenshoting everything and posting it on facebook it’s out of your control.

As someone else said, selfhosting is the only real way to overcome this problem. When it’s all on your hardware it matters a lot less if the messaged at are decrypted server side or not. Everyone has a different threat level and at some point you have to put trust in some companies but if beeper makes you uncomfortable then buy a cheap second hand mini pc and learn to self host the service.

I’m never a fan of virtualizing network related items for the sake of redundancy, if your server goes down the rest of your network can keep doing it’s thing. That being said, with the hardware you have on your hands i don’t see any solid atonemen argument for bringing in more hardware.

Proxmox is a great base for you to really ramp things up and i’d recommend looking into pfsense as a routing/firewall solution. There’s a bunch of great youtube videos that can talk you through setting it up and using it as your vpn point, adblocking, reverse proxy, and so much more.

Whoogle. It’s treated me well enough so far.

So in your case the vm is HAOS and Frigate is running inside that?

That would be one hell of a project

If i remember correct the vm i’m running lemmy on has less than 300gigs of storage and i’ve used less than half of that with running lemmy for a couple of months with a hand full of users. I can’t speak to the bandwidth aspect but i’d imagine self hosting lemmy would almost be better suited for low bandwidth so it can pull down the posts over time and hold them locally for you when you’re ready, but thats just a guess.

This looks like a great fit for my use case, i’ll dig into this more, thank you.

I’m seeing a lot of good options involve email servers and if that’s the best route then that’s where i’ll take things but i’d prefer nothing more than a simple, lightweight, calendar service.

What public services do you use that you think you’d want to self host? I’m trying to reduce the data i give to big companies so i starred running an instance of Audiobook-shelf and use it to auto grab my podcasts from an rss feed and keep a copy on my server plus it serves up all my audio books too. Or you could set up a vpn back to your network via wireguard and get the benefits of pihole when you’re not home. If you feel like really digging into things you could host your own lemmy instance, or matrix chat and bridge in other serviced but that requires a bit more advanced knowledge.

Beating google while being local would be the dream, wouldn’t it? What you say tracks but i’m like you, i’ve not done anything remotely like it so it’s very possible we’re underestimate indeed.

Agreed there isn’t any beating google, but everyone operates on different threat models. A bit of inconvenience for a bit of privacy may be worth it for some and not for others. From what little i used of it when i was trying it that yes it had much room for improvement but it was still useable. Once they get predictive text enabled i think the a swipe feature will really shine. But then again that’s just my humble opinion