I submitted a response but if i may give some feedback, the second portion brings up:

I am willing to pay a substantial amount for hardware required for self-hosting.

This seemed out of place because there were no other value related questions (iirc). Such as:

• I believe self hosting saves me money in the short term
• i believe self hosting saves me money in the long run

I'm sure you could also think of more. But i think it's pretty important because between cloud service providers and any non-free apps you want to use, it can be quite costly compared to the cost of some hardware and time it takes to set things up.

The rest of my responses don't change but if you're wanting to understand the impact of money in all of this, i think some more questions are needed

Best of luck!

You're not connected to wifi or vpn from the looks of it. jellyfin is hosted on your local network. You need to be connected to that network for any device you want to access it. The most direct way is to connect via wifi. If you want access from outside your house you'll need to look into opening a remote connection via something like cloudflare tunnel

So only good tutorials/ guides are allowed?

How does one get from shitty to good if they can't try to begin with?

Does this apply to other things, like coding, as well?

CS50 is produced by Harvard and is opencourseware (free) that isn't going away.

What is changing is that Yale won't be offering CS50 courses going forward, seemingly due to funding issues.

Just some general advice:

• get regular users. Contributors are going to be a subset of users as another commentor mentioned.
• make sure to have a CONTRIBUTING.md and that it is clear/ easy to follow. Some projects will link to a separate wiki from the .md which is fine. But make sure your "first time contributor" instructions are easy to follow to set up whatever dev environment needed. The less clear the documentation then the more motivated the contributors will need to be.
• if you haven't already, make issues with feature requests that you are wanting to add. Include enough details that someone other than you will understand your requirements.
• consider a label you use to signify "great issue for a first time contribution". These should be relatively simple fixes or simple features but give time for someone else to try them instead of completing it right away. Make sure to reference this label in your contribution documentation as a great starting point. If you're able to get someone to do a simple fix then they will have set up the dev environment and may do other future issues.
• advertise that you're looking for contributors. Point out your docs, first time contributor label, and any specific features you want/need help with.

There are much smaller projects that ask for more from commits/merge messages. This is a normal ask

Gitea, took control away from community and gave it to a for profit organization. Forgejo was born

I really like that it is a static website being updated and built on a schedule from github actions.

It would be much more customer and developer friendly to allow linking a service portal instead of providing a phone number. I would go insane if a user called me directly every time one of my projects had a bug or some perceived (non)issue. No, that's not how this works.

Ive been meaning to move to codeberg, self hosted forgejo, or sourcehut so this will only accelerate that if things get worse.

tldr - lesson learned. buy a new domain and move over to it.

but for those who want to learn something new - you are only renting your domains. If you fail to pay by the registration date then you generally get a grace period to pay more money to renew it. If you fail to pay before that period expires then the domain will be released. Some companies like godaddy will automatically buy the domain for another year (or more). But even if Godaddy doesn't then it still goes up on a list of expiring domains and there are backorder services that will try to buy the domain or auction them off.

So in the end it doesn't really matter what registrar you use. If you do not pay, it goes back to a list where people can see it is expiring and then you'll get some people who either want to legitimately use that domain or more likely they are wanting to try to sell it to you or someone else for more than they buy it for.

And I saw someone mention file a complaint. I'm sorry to say that if you did not have money to renew the domain then you aren't going to be able to do that either. This is called Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) and the fee is between $1500-4000 for 1 to 5 domains.. Additionally, just because you file a complaint does not mean the issue will be resolved favorably or timely. These complaints can last years, and there is no guarantee you will get the domain back.

This is why you should always pay your domain rental fee. And if you don't, then you need to either be willing to pay a ton of money to get it back or you will need to move on. Sorry its a tough lesson to learn but if you're just a student then you probably weren't using this to run a business or anything so in the end you are quite fortunate.