Check out Kavita! It sounds perfect for what you’re doing and I have had literally 0 issues using all of their built-in features. It’s a surprisingly stable and full-fledged open-source product.

The pictures folder on my instance is at 1.3GB after two days. It’s just me and my friend. About how many communities are you subscribed to?

• Lemmy Instance
• VaultWarden - Password manager
• Jellyfin - Movies/TV Shows
• Roon / Roon ARC - Music
• OneDev - Used to use Gitlab but couldn’t afford the self-hosted instance anymore and want the paid features, which this mostly has.
• Dokuwiki - Used to use as a wiki, switched to…
• Trilium - Similar to Obsidian but open source.
• Kavita - Comics/books
• TubeArchivist - YouTube video downloader/viewer
• PodGrab - Podcast manager
• Wallabag - Website article saver/bookmarker etc. If anyone has a better suggestion for FOSS bookmark management please let me know!
• Mealie - Recipe manager (grabs recipes from a ton of different sites)

I use TrueNAS Scale for my NAS and Ubuntu server for my VM’s/home server. I probably am forgetting something, but, that’s what’s listed in my Portainer :).

It was super easy. I just edited the config file in the Ansible playbook and needed to edit the certbot task because I use Cloudflare but other than that it was a breeze.

Well, as you mentioned before it’s to enjoy the “technical aspect”, which could be many reasons. For one, if the instance you signed up on shuts down there goes your account with it. I feel better self-hosting because I am in control of when/if it shuts down.

You can set your instance to private and close registrations, which is what I am doing. That way you can use it only for yourself and a few friends and still be connected to the fediverse. The communities that you make on your self-hosted instance wouldn’t be connected, though.