If you want a complete unit with custom hardware and tuned custom software, look at MikroTik. Solid hardware, dependable software, good support, good community.
If you want to build your own, grab any multi-ethernet micropc from aliexpress and install OPNsense. Cheap and flexible. But you’ll be on your own once (not if) something fails.
Both of these are essentially pro-level options with lots of headroom to build up to advanced services. I’d stay away from OpenWRT which is essentially just an open source consumer grade wifi router image. You’d be replacing your crappy (but supported) router with the same thing just without support.
One other option I would mention if you like nice centralized web ui’s, have a look at Ubiquiti’s Unify. If you can afford to go all-in on a Unify router, backbone switch and wifi access points, the combined management is really a step above the competition.

For actual hardware: Hetzner. For VPS there are many choices. Digitalocean is cheap and easy, has european data centers, and some decent value add services.

Visual Studio Code, with a syncing folder, a markdown plugin that suits you, and Claude Code to sort your notes for you. :-)

Hey claude, upgrade my kernel will you? Thanks!

You’re right. I confused Tixati with Fopnu, another p2p tool by the same developer. Fopnu is the one with the library of files model, which I feel would be a good model for i2p. Just putting Tixati on i2p does nothing new.

Edit: I confused Tixati and Fopnu, another p2p tool by the same dev when I made this comment.
Hmm. Reading the support page, it looks like there is no actual integration with i2p in the Tixati client itself. It looks more like an existing i2p client can function as a proxy, allowing Tixati clients to communicate over i2p. Similar to how a socks proxy allows Tixati to function over any remote network, like say a vpn.

Not un-useful, but the number of Tixati users is already limited on the open internet (and heavily slanted towards certain unsavoury interests). Finding other Tixati users on i2p just limits your potential peer group further. Mixing open internet connectivity with i2p connectivity also seems like a de-anonymization vector waiting to strike.

i2p would certainly benefit from a well designed easy to understand file sharing tool like Tixati. Specifically its focus on keeping libraries of files shared for longer periods, rather than the short-term burstiness of torrents, would be a good fit. But I would want it to be significantly locked down to the i2p network, and get some code reviews, before trusting it.

It will be perfectly reliable for a while. You’ll grow to rely on it, stop thinking about it. And then one day half your drives will suddenly be gone. You won’t know why, you won’t know how to fix it. Your raid set will already be broken. Your data will be gone.

Don’t plug and play with your data.

It’s a .i2p site, you need i2p up and running to access it.

“I can’t think of any examples of companies that, in real life, enshittified because they were successful.”
Microsoft.

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I have tried opus, and indeed have had issues with players not supporting it. But that was years ago now, so I expect that’s no longer an issue. Using ogg is mostly just inertia on my end.

Interesting idea, but I feel anyone who wants this already has the tools available.
Personally, I use Syncthing to synchronize a Media folder across my desktops, phones and tablets.
Media/Music contains my active music collection, mostly ogg conversions of the source flac files. I use .m3u/.m3u8 files as good old playlists, saved to the Media/Music root folder with relative paths. This allows players like AIMP on windows to play/edit those playlists, and players like GoneMAD on Android to play them without any kind of active internet connection.
There’s also Media/Audiobooks, Media/Comics, Media/Movies, etc… Yes, they’re subsets of the full collections on my NAS, but I’ve never seen that as a disadvantage.

I would suggest looking at Syncthing. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but it works peer to peer, without any kind of central host, ip or domain name requirements. You simply install it on the client machines, and they work out how to talk to each other over any available networks.

Beware changing the casing on your files or directories though, Syncthing was made entirely case sensitive, which does not play nice with Windows.

One very nice feature is that it does have an android client (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.catfriend1.syncthingandroid/), and it supports full background syncing to your local storage on the phone. Great for syncing your photos, but also music. You add some mp3’s on your desktop computer, and by the time you’ve put on your jacket they’re on your phone ready to listen to without any ‘service’ getting in your way.

A more advanced tip; Get a VPS somewhere in the cloud with cheap storage, and have Syncthing on it listening on port 443. That will allow syncing in more restrictive corporate settings, which often don’t allow connections to port 22000. And it gives you a ‘cloud backup’ of your important files in one go.

Proxmox is Debian. :-)
I do always suggest installing Debian first, and then installing Proxmox on top. This allows you to properly set up your disks, and networking as needed, as the Proxmox installer is a bit limited: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_12_Bookworm
Once you have it up and running, have a look at the CT Templates. There’s a whole set of pre-configured templates from TurnkeyLinux (again, debian+) that make it trivial to set up all kinds of services in lightweight LXC Containers.
For Home Assistant a VM is your best bet, as it makes setting up connectivity way easier than messing with docker networking. It also allows easy USB passthrough, for things like ZWave/Zigbee/Bluetooth adapters.

https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/
Downloads email from most providers, allows for local (text) searches, and to upload it again to an imap provider.

For backing up your email from gmail or any other provider, check out MailStore Home edition: https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/ It will grab everything in the account and store it locally, and then allow you to push it back onto any other imap service when necessary. Great for migrating your email, and keeping a just-in-case backup.

Email is the one thing I have stopped trying to do myself. It just has too many things that you absolutely need to keep updated. Have a look at Forward Email (https://forwardemail.net/en). They can hook up to pretty much any domain setup you already have, and do the heavy lifting for you.

If you’re already going to the trouble of setting up ZFS for the two NVMe disks, I would suggest setting up a separate pool on the HDD as well. It will save you from monitoring two different filesystem types and give all the ZFS features, checksumming, compression, snapshots, etc… Do make sure your server has a decent chunk of memory through, as your VMs will be fighting the ARC for ram…

A proxmox root device uses barely any space. Mine usually sit around 12-14 Gb used. Writes are also negligible. DRAM less ssds are not a problem. I would suggest installing Debian first, so you can properly partition your root device before installing proxmox (https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_12_Bookworm). You’ll have much more control over your disks and networking than using proxmox’s own installer. Start with a 64Gb root partition, and leave the rest of the drive empty for future use/SLC cache.

Unless your VMs are somehow high volume data writers, like a proof-of-space-coin, I wouldn’t worry about it. Homelab setups rarely reach anywhere near the kind of write endurance of ssd’s.

Your VMs are not going to write to the root device, so it won’t matter.

You won’t notice the difference in performance of a filesystem on a rotating harddisk. Look for other useful features, like at-rest-encryption, and checksumming for bitrot protection.

I would use a filesystem with checksumming, rather than relying on any point-in-time check to monitor HDD’s. Assume they will all fail eventually, because they will.

Security and bugfixes, after one or two rounds of testing by early adopters/key users. Preferably through some form of automatic updates.

New features and breaking changes, or anything that requires the end-user to pay attention, I’d say no more than 4 times a year, and using a non-automatic form of update. The hard thing is getting the user’s attention on the changes, and not just clicking next and then having a broken or insecure installation.