Beware of radarr, if you remove a library there it clears all files without warning! (That's why I came back to manual. Setup was a hassle, and having to come to a backup was the last drop in my glass)
Being p2p is a huge bonus, it exceeds (and predates) the self-host category! If I recall correctly, I had an intro post to the system somewhere.. can't look it up ATM.
Even then, there's dockerswarm.rocks (linking directly to tutorial to show how easy it is!)
Right now, yuzu emulator is being forked and taken over by multiple developers, re-releasing and promising to continue its development in spite of Nintendo lawyers. For example, nuzu. All this is to say that is not the best time for a newbie to jump in, unless they are willing to re-jump in whatever fork out there turns to have a good community of developers and resists Nintendo efforts to shut them off.
I understand AI well enough. The argument that companies training models on data with copyright were actually doing piracy holds true to me. Being in favor or against, since these are big corps using artists work without paying royalties is an open discussion maybe, but nonetheless.. I felt that a clarification was due. Sorry (or not) to open the offtopic hatch...
Truenas scale is Debian, if you just use it remotely it may be a good bet. If you may use the server as workstation (e.g. desktop) then you better use Debian itself (or both, as VMs under Proxmox). Managing ZFS is super easy, just create a couple of volumes with small and big blocksize, in either cockpit or whatever web ui. You may also switch OS (e.g. disaster or play around), and recover these effortlessly with zfs import command from CLI. Good luck!
This conflict is positive. Many other reverse proxy software wouldn't be as "transparent" and the safety would then be false pretend.
The "simpler" just connect the cable and make it work is feasible, https://shallowsky.com/blog/linux/raspberry-pi-ethernet-gadget.html
Also, the number of seeds are a good measure for popularity of media that one might not had in their radar at all. Meanwhile, platforms try to push all sort of content only because they produced it, recommendation algorithms are needed (and insufficient), because there a huge load of crap being produced at such a high rate...
Rclone.org is poetry then ;)
if IM was your need, check snikket.org although I can't remember how well they support OTP encryption... of course it's subjective how many layers one need, I'd be happy with just self-host and TLS, that's how far I'd go for me and my relatives for day-to-day privacy.
Syncthing is p2p. The servers only see your devices IP addresses and let them connect to share data themselves. That's why it's a relay. But AFAIK files only goes from, and to, your syncthing clients; without passing through the relays. At most, the relay may see some metadata as filenames. I have been syncing passwords like this since long ago. Never jumped to Bitwarden because I didn't had the need... May do so anyway because of OTP and Passkeys..