Yep, there was a time when streaming services actually became easier than piracy. That was when there was basically just Netflix and Hulu. If you had both of those, you had everything.

Back in the ancient Greek era there were people worried that printed books were going to rot peoples’ minds because they would just be absorbed in them 24/7.

Do what you wanna do, dude.

Yeah these alternate platforms are always nice in the early days - the early adopters tend to be like-minded at least in the sense of trying to build a nice community. Hopefully this place stands up to time better than some of the others have over the years.

Seconding - you can actually squeeze a surprising amount of use out of a Pi4 running Docker.

It’s to be expected during the transition period. Honestly if that’s what it takes to get users over here, I say more power to them.

After many years of tinkering, I finally gave in and converted my whole stack over to UnRAID a few years ago. You know what? It’s awesome, and I wish I had done it sooner. It automates so many of the more tedious aspects of home server management. I work in IT, so for me it’s less about scratching the itch and more about having competent hosting of services I consider mission-critical. UnRAID lets me do that easily and effectively.

Most of my fun stuff is controlled through Docker and VMs via UnRAID, and I have a secondary external Linux server which handles some tasks I don’t want to saddle UnRAID with (PFSense, Adblocking, etc). The UnRAID server itself has 128GB RAM and dual XEON CPUs, so plenty of go for my home projects. I’m at 12TB right now but I was just on Amazon eyeing some 8TB drives…

This exact situation is why I eventually shut down access to my media server to only my household. I had the same setup for many years and it just got to be a clusterfuck of people messaging me that things were broken, not working how they wanted, need to have more features, aren’t working fast enough, etc. I work in IT. I get enough of that when I’m clocked in, I don’t need it at home too.

Good luck though, OP.

AudioBookShelf is awesome for audiobooks. I can’t speak to its capability as an eReader but I thought I’d throw that out there for anyone wanting a second opinion. I use it daily and the Android app is great too. My go-to audiobook server for life if it stays just like it is right now.

I’ll second Ubooquity. I have a lot of experience with this, as I’ve been self-hosting my eBooks and Audiobooks for many years now. Ubooquity is not perfect, but if you’re willing to tinker with it, you can get it set up pretty nicely. There are themes, and the Plex theme actually makes it look really slick.

Kavita is the new kid on the block for me - I have been testing it out as a general-purpose eReader but I’m not ready to give it my recommendation yet.

SO and I are going out to dinner tonight. Tomorrow if we feel like getting up early enough we may go check out some local farmers’ markets or garage sales. Besides that, no specific plans. Maybe grill some ribs I’ve got in the freezer.