Self-hosting

Awesome! I really appreciate the recommendations -- going to have to give these a test!

No worries at all! So I use Miniflux as my RSS reader but there TONS of different ones -- some open source, some freemium, some premium and closed source. Even VLC and Thunderbird can be used for keeping track of RSS feeds! For that front, I'd just search and give a couple a try -- find which one suits your needs best. I used FreshRSS before making the switch to Miniflux but there are hosted options like Feedly.

In terms of finding things to read via RSS, you've got a ton of options there too! There's a lot of open RSS feeds out there that just aren't advertised. A few that I have are:

• I think all youtube channels (stackoverflow post) have the option for RSS. You can go about it the way outlined in that post but I've found using https://youtube[.]com/channel/CHANNEL_NAME_HERE is good enough if I want to sub to every video of a channel
• A lot of smaller blogs -- most wordpress sites actually have a default rss feed that gets created unless you actively disable it
• Substack news letters/blogs for folks that I follow have this support built in
• I actually found out yesterday how to subscribe to both my Lemmy inbox and all the subscribed communities that I'm in to get those over RSS (there's a little RSS feed icon next to the drop down filters for the latter)
• I use hnrss for hackernews since they don't have a direct rss feed you can subscribe to. Lobste.rs at least does have the ability to subscribe to multiple "subreddits"/"communities"/what have you and be able to filter things out -- otherwise it gets really noisy
• There's a couple of folks that I follow on Twitter via Nitter that supports RSS (how to guide but since bird site is such a cess pool, might reconsider some of these.
• I live in a fire prone area so I also subscribe to some of NOAA's RSS feeds in case my family needs to evacuate
• You can even pull various subreddits over rss if you're still using reddit for somethings. The one thing that I loved about using these rss feeds is that you could group subreddits together into one rss feed and just have that but I imagine this will change with the API changes
• This doesn't even include all the podcasts since the way they're distributed is built on-top of RSS feeds!

The one big problem with RSS is that there really isn't a good way to find other RSS feeds -- or at least I haven't found a good way, ha! Typically, I'll get linked to a site from hackernews, lobsters, here, wherever. If I like their stuff, I'll just paste their URL into Miniflux to see if they have an RSS feed and subscribe from there. I really wish that there was a recommendation list of good rss feeds but honestly, sometimes the best way is word of mouth? Hope this helps!

Edit: Put brackets around the youtube link so that it doesn't turn into an actual link

I would recommend just starting with migrating your Plex setup to Jellyfin. You can get that done in 30 minutes to an hour.

Setting up all of the arr's takes hours, depending on how intense you want the automations to be (hours to days). I started with Sonarr for TV/Anime direct installed on Windows. Once I knew I liked it and wanted to keep using it, I bought a small form factor PC and installed Ubuntu Server and Docker (which takes a lot longer).

If you can follow guides on the internet, there are tons out there. What OS are you running?

Honestly, it took a little while because I was learning a lot of it on the fly. If I had to put a hard number on it, maybe like a week of actual work with tuning and permissions but a lot more time in terms f reading how things should all plug in together. Right now, if I had to set it up, maybe an hour of actual work? But that's because I know how to write a docker compose file, how to tunnel the traffic through a vpn in a docker container, how volume mounts work, etc. etc.

It's really intimidating to start with but there's a fair number of really good guides on the internet for basic setups. I kind of started it one thing at a time -- set up a docker container for jellyfin to point to my existing media, then setup Sonarr to manage only the TV shows, then this one, then that one, yadda yadda. Incrementally doing it is really the way to go so you can test what works, what breaks, and what is actually something that you need.

I love infuse. Jellyfin on TVos is not great as of now. Infuse also lets you sync content on iOS devices. It supports Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby. Jellyfin is getting better though.

Infuse is rock solid. Absolutely no complaints.

Awesome will have a look!

I kind of thought since I don't have a fixed IP address this wouldn't work but with IPv6 this should not be an issue actually. I will do some testing :)

Oh that sounds great, I will definitely check it out then!

I'm having an issue where it will let me write to the hard disk when plugged into my main pc, but when I set it up on the "server" laptop it only let's me read files

Ahh, nah i got the pirating part just fine, I'm just getting sick of streaming everything from my phone and would just like a central storage for my home, that I can stream from and use as a back up for "data"

Windows 11 right now, and after getting everything going, so far all it will let me do is "read" when streaming from the server. I would like to be able to upload from whatever device as well