Ditto, and aside from that the thing that takes most of the time are usually tasks of my own creation. When it comes to smart home, that might something like home assistant dashboards. There are a ton, ton of easier ways to do it, but I want mine just so. But anyway, 2-4 hours later, and I won't touch it again likely for another year aside from occasionally adding a device.

I'll add a tiny little suggestion since I think this is generally in the vibe of making sure people even understand what they can self host - find the thing that interests them with a low barrier to entry, and for god's sake when you make a recommendation, don't go into hard mode immediately.

EG: if you have a friend over and they're like "wow this plex/jellyfin/emby thing is cool" then tell them about it, and don't tell them they need to buy a rack, learn about installing OS's, VMs, docker, RAID setups and filesystems, etc.

Either:

• just setup everything for them with the understanding you're on the hook for supporting it
• give them that first hit, baby. "Let me show you how to install a VPN, torrent client and media streamer on whatever potato of a computer you have laying around." This is extremely easy, and trust me if they're into it don't be surprised if next weekend they're texting you asking about how you automatically grab everything or what to do about storage or whatever.

edit: this is a good example of why I really like unRAID for this. It's what I run now because although I know how to do all of the things that it accomplishes, it's just much easier. Even still I wouldn't expect a novice to really understand or get much done without help.

Nice list!