Namecheap API works just fine with Certbot DNS challenges for me, FWIW.

I have a DS418play which is several generations behind and it runs a dozen Docker containers, including all of my media automation, just fine. I even host a Minecraft server for my nephews!

And fully supported by Synology, too! They are pretty good at embracing the community while still keeping security as a priority.

I should just start over and try again, probably did something silly that screwed things up.

Do you have personal experience with Nextcloud or Owncloud? I have tried the former and it’s been a general nightmare. I’m using Docker and have a dozen or more other containers that all work just fine, but even once I got Nextcloud installed and working it had all kinds of permission problems or just wouldn’t install things from its own built-in app store. Never did get any kind of document collaboration working.

The top of Immich’s home page says “Do not use it as the only way to store your photos and videos!” Is that hyperbole or a realistic warning?

Nice start and solid choices so far!

Definitely recommend looking into Docker, it’ll make cross-platform conflicts and migrations near effortless. Repurposing unused hardware is great, but can also be inefficient or bulky, so a hardware upgrade might be in your future eventually. ;)

If you are interested in automating any media retrieval and/or organization, which I gather you might given you have Plex, look into the *arr ecosystem: Sonarr for TV, Radarr for movies, plus others for books and music and pretty much anything else you can imagine!

My setup is based on Docker and a Synology NAS as the hardware. I recently set up a Minecraft server so my nieces and nephews have somewhere to play together, but may need to move that to my PC as the NAS is not very RAM or CPU heavy.

I think a true unification defeats the purpose of federation. That said, I have been using Lemmy Handshake to sync my subscriptions between accounts. I generally use one account to login, but sometimes an instance has technical issues or content seems to be missing so I like having a backup option in a pinch.