For what it’s worth, they’re dropping the branded drive requirement https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/synology-caves-walks-back-some-drive-restrictions-on-upcoming-nas-models/

Are there any security concerns that this is a Chinese company?

Does it do RAID?

I’m in a similar situation with my 218+ so I’m interested to hear some answers. It’s still running great though so I don’t need to replace it soon but I like planning ahead

I don’t even know what a reverse proxy is

I make the account for them. Then I log in as them and set it up so they only see my server. Then I send them the credentials and have them login

Does it work on a smart tv or roku or whatever?

Jellyfin is hardly a no-brainer. I set it up out of curiosity a few weeks ago and my first question was how do I give access to my friends and family. So I searched, and all of the results were talking about setting up a VPN or a reverse proxy or whatever. Man, I just want to tell my mom “install this app on your tv and log in”, which is exactly what Plex does.

I get that Plex is enshittifying, but pretending Jellyfin is a drop-in replacement is delusional.

Dude how the hell am I supposed to walk my mom through setting up tailscale on her Roku?

And what if you have multiple friends all sharing each others libraries?

This is not a feasible solution let alone a “very easy” one.

But why can I “just install a program” on my windows machine or on my phone and it is that easy?

Obsidian and it syncs to my home server

I didn’t say it was, I’m just answering the dude’s question

Grayjay

Right. I mean, I looked into this a few years ago when I set it up and just accepted my fate

You should definitely set up pihole but I don’t think it’ll block ads on streaming apps unless I’m wrong and someone can point me to something that explains how I can set that up.

I have a Synology NAS, and while their Synology Photos is really good, it’s no match for Google Photos. It’s not their fault though, any self-hosted solution is going to be harder to share photos and do collaborative albums and such. And Google Photos image and face recognition is just not matched. I backup my entire photo library to Synology Photos but most of them are also in Google Photos for ease of access and sharing.