one main question should also be, do you want to selfhost or not.

because plex is not selfhosted imo due to their login servers.

you could use tailscale for that, it should be able to punch through the CGNAT

this is the way to do it.

and periodically keep taps on main releases to swap from 0.18 to 0.19

check your metadata and set the correct artist there. for every issue related to that it has always been shitty (extended) metadata. (with people often claiming “no but it’s fine” until they take a real look at it and see that it’s shit).

so give it a look and clean that up e.g. with mp3tag and/or musicbrainz picard and you will be good to go.

but then how would you sell your 500k karma account to some shady company? /s

maybe that’s a dumb question, so sorry for that, but wouldn’t it be easier to just use a whitelist for federation instead of a blocklist?

give cockpit a shot if you only need a gui for general management. works great together with podman