zerodawn

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.