Why not join efforts then?
I think Manyfold could be adapted to be a bit more generic for things like game art or render movie assets sharing as well.
You can use the Photon frontend instead.
Mainly 3D printing files, but I guess it would work for other type of files as well.
Even more problematic are entire communities made out of astroturfing bots. This kind of stuff is increasingly easy and cheap to set up and will fool most people looking for advise online.
Glinet makes travel routers with OpenWrt on them and internal microSD slots as well as external USB ports. Pretty easy to turn those into a media server as well.
Hubzilla does what you want.
Don’t overthink your choice—remember that you can still consume content from all other instances and communities, no matter which one you choose as your home.
I find the framing here very problematic. Both because passively "consuming content" is inherently problematic and because Lemmy just doesn't have sufficient "content" to enable that, thus leading to quick disappointment of users looking for that kind of experience.
And in general it does matter with instance you chose. Not to the point that new users should worry too much about it, yes, but there are distinct cultures between different instances and it is a strength of the Fediverse that instances are not just faceless pieces of infrastructure, i.e. pipes to content, but rather thriving communities with real people behind them.
The audio is very quiet, it's probably a microphone or post processing issue.
Castropod is cool, maybe you can try to figure out why it doesn't properly federate with Lemmy and file some issues on both sides?
Pcie slots also allow adding more nvme ssd drives, although sadly most mainboards do not support pcie bifurcation, so you will be limited to a single nvme ssd per slot.
Up to RPi4 the power efficiency was a lot better, but performance wise you really struggled due to lack of options to connect faster storage. With the RPi5 becoming more power hungry (but also more performant) it is less clear cut, and price wise a refurbished x86 pc isn't really more expensive either.
All in all I would say the benefits of using standard x86 outweigh the slightly higher power use these days. RPis are still good if you need the specific hardware GPIO etc. that is has though. But for self-hosting go for x86 and be mindful of peak loads (these CPUs become much more power hungry on higher clock-speeds, especially turbo-boost).
That's partially what https://fediseer.com/ does.
The same dev also made a CSAM scanning tool based on AI image recognition.