That's completely fair and mirrors pretty much exactly my own thoughts on the matter if I were to run my own public instance so that's definitely reassuring!
Thanks for taking the time to respond, your transparency is much appreciated.

I like how you've set lemm.ee up, thinking of signing up. Out of curiosity, is not having any instance blocked a policy of sorts? I ask because I couldn't help but notice this is the largest instance with no blacklist according to awesome-lemmy-instances, and I do rather enjoy the idea of being able to have a home from where I can mostly enjoy lemmy as I see fit.

Bit of an odd journey here, migrated from a Windows 10 + Docker on WSL2 setup on the side of my main PC to a dedicated DIY Proxmox server/NAS setup. Set it up with snapraid since it's mostly media files, will add a proper ZFS mirror or two in the future when I'm able to afford the upgrade.
I'm mainly in it for the usual media services, Jellyfin, Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, plus Jellyseerr (Overseer fork with Jellyfin support). Got Nextcloud as well, plan on looking into Lidarr and Mylarr at some point too.
Also have a Pi 4 running Home Assistant and Adguard DNS, as well as Tailscale all over for VPN. Contemplating moving HA to the proper server for the performance/storage reliability boost but at the end of the day it only really toggles lights rn so no real need.

Not OP either but in case you used to enjoy greader as much as I did back in the day, Inoreader feels extremely close.
On the open source side of things, Feeder looks great as well, although I haven't used it myself.

It's still a WIP but that's pretty much where I'm at as well, was going crazy trying to figure out which multi terabyte service I was going to use when in reality the actually irreplaceable stuff falls well under a single TB of data lol. Might go with Backblaze as well.

They might be confused because your original comment said sending emails is the only thing you can do, I'm assuming it's a typo and you meant it's the only thing you can't do