I think you can go with Yunohost. It is easy to start selfhosting and exposing services to the web. I use it for more than a year, and it is super cool. Especially I love the fact, that it is easy for newcomers, but also it is opened for customisation for more pro users. Yunohost provides domain with ddns, Fail2Ban and tells which ports should be opened (80 and 443 is all you need, maybe another one for ssh). It also provides SSO for hiding services that do not use authentication.

Adguard Home works really bad on RPi Zero and not as fast as PiHole on Rpi3B+. That’s why Adguard is heavier for me.

I used both and Adguard looks more buggy for me. And also it is heavier.

Asrock X300 Mini with 2x HDD 2 TB 2,5" drives in Raid1, NVMe Samsung, 1 TB 2,5" HDD connected via USB and Zigbee gateway

It has place for two drives - one NVMe 2280 and one SATA 2,5". If you want something bigger, but still Mini, You can buy Asrock X300 DeskMini with AM4 socket. I have this with Ryzen 7 5700g. It offers two slots for 2280 NVMe drives and two slots for 2,5" SATA drives.

Yunohost or Snap. Snap catalogue of server apps is small but it offfers Home Assistant, Adguard home and Plex.

Maybe HP 800 Mini with i5-6500t? I had this, and now it is available in Poland for around 500 PLN (~112 EUR). Something like: https://allegro.pl/oferta/hp-800-g2-dm-i5-6500t-8gb-ssd-120gb-w10p-mini-13752172316?fromVariant=13752110554 I had the same model but G3 (different chassis) Power consumption was low. With a 1TB USB HDD connected, power consumption was 7-8 watts.

Yes. I have Orange Pi Zero 2 with 1 GB of RAM running Ubuntu. This is actually very powerful machine, more powerful than my Raspberry Pi 3B+. i bought it for about 180 polish zloty (around 40 euros). I use it for printing server with Ghostscript printer app installed via Snap. I also tried Wireguard and MongoDB - everything works fine. it works really well, but it sits around 50 C on CPU, so it can get hot.

Wallabag for read-it-later articles and HedgeDoc for md notes

It will not be that great like on Raspberry Pi, but Mini PC are also very low on energy. For example,. Wyse 5070 with J5005 idles around 3-5 W, which is really great. i had HP 800 Mini G3 that idled ~7-8W. Mini PCs are more powerful, expandable and can use normal SSD Drive. For selfhosting they are better, but in some places Raspberry Pi (or alternative like Orange Pi) will be better, especially when you need something small and really low power

I don’t know when you tried Nextcloud snap. I was using NC Snap on low tier VPS back in 2021 and 2022. For me it was really good experience, and I saw that a lot of people had the same opinion. Unfortunately, snapcraft lacks a lot of apps and even in that small group there are only a few apps that are supported.

Snap apps could be good for a lot of ‘just works’ stuff, but the app catalogue is tiny. Hardly any of the app catalogue is kept up to date.

I just telling why Yunohost will not switch to Docker. Running normal Docker app wouldn’t be coherent with yunohost package managment. And how you can see, no containerization brings problem with updating some apps, not only with Lemmy, but - if I remember right - with Wallabag. Yunohost way of things has advantages and disadvantages. I use Yunohost for more than a year and I am not planning switch to Docker.

Yunohost uses his own package managing and package format based on native app builds. Migrating to Docker would simply be a waste of this work. Furthermore, Yunohost is a great alternative to hosting with Docker. if Yunohost migrated to Docker, it would not be an alternative, but just a slightly simpler front-end.

But yeah, some sort of containerization/sandboxing in Yunohost would be nice.

Yunohost provides free domains (nohost.me, ynh.fr or noho.st) with Dynamic DNS, but i bought domain in Gandi. I use this simple script https://github.com/cichy1173/yunoDnsUpdater to update DNS if IP changes. I am thinking about buying fixed IP, but it is additional cost every month.

it is easy to use outside the network too. I use Yunohost for more than a 1 year

I use Nextcloud photos. It is far from perfect but it is OK. I hate lack of good Mobile App.

I think it is good to ask for help on official forum: forum.yunohost.org.

For PiHole it will be OK, but for Nextcloud or Jellyfin is too slow. It is better to buy used MiniPC/Terminal - it will be more powerful

Wallabag! I am using it for more than a year and it is great

I do not know where are you from but in Poland Dell Wyse 5070 with J5005 is really cheap and popular for selfhosting. It is really powerful (for passively cooled device) and a couple of my friends are using it for selfhosting Home Assistant