Ulrich

I assume daily would be a bit much considering it’s gonna be a few TB worth of HDDs which aren’t exactly fast

What is the concern here?

I was going to say the same. It’s wonderful.

or are they (as I believe) two different things with the same name?

They are.

FreshRSS is self-hostable and as far as I can tell - gPodder isn’t.

It is.

I don’t use it. I only listen to podcasts on my phone.

It is both a sync service and a client.

The settings are way too complicated and defaults are not intuitive. Took me forever to figure out how to purge old downloads I hadn’t listened to. Constant errors when trying to download. Does not want to play video podcasts as audio-only.

Doesn’t matter, you don’t need the UI. You just connect it to AntennaPod or other supported client(s).

Yep

GPodder is the FreshESS equivalent for podcasts.

It’s not advisable to expose Jellyfin to the internet.

Wrong.

Telling people they don’t need VPN means you are encouraging them to expose it to the internet.

Wrong again.

Ive tried them all and only stuck with Yunohost.

CasaOS is not an operating system

No, but ZimaOS is the actual OS version.

I’m not telling anyone what to do, I’m just saying the VPN is not necessary.

No such scheme required

I’d consider Jellyfin if the end user access was more plug and play.

It’s about as plug and play as any other website. They just open the app, type in the URL, and log in with their credentials and…that’s it.

it’s just that the dozens of hours you spent learning to use a GUI

This is utter nonsense. You do not need to learn to use a GUI. You just look at the available buttons and click the ones you need. And when you click them they do what they say, they don’t return a “command not found” or “undefined error” with zero diagnostic information. And they work the same regardless of what OS or distro you’re on.

The fact that you don’t understand this is why you’re not qualified to tell people that it’s “not scary”.

You wouldn’t. A lot of tech people wouldn’t. But it is. I’ve found this out the hard way, after spending dozens of hours trying to figure it out. You’re not doing anyone any favors.

It’s not as scary as people make it sound.

It is not “scary”. It is complicated and requires special knowlege.

How will they detect “VPN traffic”?

Many admins say it is a lot of work and they put a lot of effort, money and energy in it. Some even close their instance after few years, because it is just too much.

I would say you should limit the number of active accounts. Probably to a few hundred at most in the beginning. Close registration when things start to become too much. Re-evaluate and re-open as necessary. There’s no reason you have to allow thousands of people on your instance.