Look into Pangolin with crowdsec. It’s basically the all in one tested solution for your plans.

Does Lawrence Systems still not publish on peertube?

Never use SMR disks in a RAID/NAS. You’re taking a huge gamble on data loss / disk failures if you do. Also it will be slow as fuck, really fucking slow, often unusable for anything but incredibly slow backups.

CMR disks are the ONLY way to go.

Or just switch to a distro that breaks every other day like arch /s

If I see AI slop I downvote. Shouldn’t that generally take care if it if everybody does it?

As long as it can be turned off and does not use any non-local services for OCR it’s a good addition. As much as convenience is nice, privacy still has to come first.