Jamoke
This post got me to try out selfoss but after it being pretty buggy and unable to fetch 50% of the feeds I was interested in, I looked elsewhere. I wanted to install Tiny Tiny RSS but the instructions weren't my thing. Finally, I settled on FreshRSS and I love it. All the feeds work. The only complaint I have is that, at least it seems, you need to manually add labels to each article and instead just put a feed under a category. I wish I could put feeds under any amount of labels or categories I want. Maybe there's an extension for it that I have not seen yet.
I use Roon ARC to self-host my library. It is paid, but, I bought the lifetime subscription because there is really no other music app that has the features Roon has.
Other than that, I have HiBy R3 Pro that is useless for Bluetooth, and when I'm hiking I want Bluetooth.
The pictures folder on my instance is at 1.3GB after two days. It's just me and my friend. About how many communities are you subscribed to?
It was super easy. I just edited the config file in the Ansible playbook and needed to edit the certbot task because I use Cloudflare but other than that it was a breeze.
Well, as you mentioned before it's to enjoy the "technical aspect", which could be many reasons. For one, if the instance you signed up on shuts down there goes your account with it. I feel better self-hosting because I am in control of when/if it shuts down.
You can set your instance to private and close registrations, which is what I am doing. That way you can use it only for yourself and a few friends and still be connected to the fediverse. The communities that you make on your self-hosted instance wouldn't be connected, though.
Check out Kavita! It sounds perfect for what you're doing and I have had literally 0 issues using all of their built-in features. It's a surprisingly stable and full-fledged open-source product.