Ulrich

or are they (as I believe) two different things with the same name?

They are.

FreshRSS is self-hostable and as far as I can tell - gPodder isn’t.

It is.

I don’t use it. I only listen to podcasts on my phone.

It is both a sync service and a client.

The settings are way too complicated and defaults are not intuitive. Took me forever to figure out how to purge old downloads I hadn’t listened to. Constant errors when trying to download. Does not want to play video podcasts as audio-only.

Doesn’t matter, you don’t need the UI. You just connect it to AntennaPod or other supported client(s).

Yep

GPodder is the FreshRSS equivalent for podcasts.

It’s not advisable to expose Jellyfin to the internet.

Wrong.

Telling people they don’t need VPN means you are encouraging them to expose it to the internet.

Wrong again.

I’m not telling anyone what to do, I’m just saying the VPN is not necessary. Mine is exposed.

No such scheme required

I’d consider Jellyfin if the end user access was more plug and play.

It’s about as plug and play as any other website. They just open the app, type in the URL, and log in with their credentials and…that’s it.

it’s just that the dozens of hours you spent learning to use a GUI

This is utter nonsense. You do not need to learn to use a GUI. You just look at the available buttons and click the ones you need. And when you click them they do what they say, they don’t return a “command not found” or “undefined error” with zero diagnostic information. And they work the same regardless of what OS or distro you’re on.

The fact that you don’t understand this is why you’re not qualified to tell people that it’s “not scary”.

You wouldn’t. A lot of tech people wouldn’t. But it is. I’ve found this out the hard way, after spending dozens of hours trying to figure it out. You’re not doing anyone any favors.

It’s not as scary as people make it sound.

It is not “scary”. It is complicated and requires special knowlege.