Collision, not pre-image attack (the two are different)

This is FUD. There is no publicly known pre-image attack against SHA1, the hash used in mainline DHT.

Do not expose Jellyfin to the general Internet. They have security issues, I would not trust that (no cloudflare does not save you by default).

There are basically two ways: VPN, or authenticated reverse proxy. VPN is probably the easiest to setup and the most flexible, but it’s a bit of a pita to use.

Authenticated reverse proxy will break apps, but the web app will work (and you can setup your reverse proxy to allow specific user agents from the VPN to bypass it, allowing apps on the VPN to work). I currently do this so I can look at metadata on my phone without a VPN setup.

You don’t even need the vps unless you’re behind cgnat Though you should never expose Jellyfin to the Internet, they have had and continue to have major security problems

I use a Firefox container tied to a socks proxy on my router to bypass VPN for tricky sites. Yeah I know not the answer you’re looking for but some things have to be done (banking, health insurance) and if they already know my home address there’s little reason to hide the IP address

My two issues with porkbun:

They don’t seem to support wildcard/catch all email forwarding

Dynamic DNS is done with an API key that has access to the entire account(!!!)

Though, I might move to them anyway (just moved a domain to namecheap which I used years ago and wow their ux sucks, and they don’t support dane or sshfp, Google domains was really good rip)

Tbf Tor needs benign traffic for the important stuff to hide in.

CAA can also be used to disable http verification, meaning you would have to have control of DNS to be able to get a certificate (which the VPS ideally wouldn’t have).

I use Caddy as a reverse proxy, but most of this should carry over to nginx. I used to use basic_auth at the proxy level, which worked fine(-ish) though it broke Kavita (because websockets don’t work with basic auth, go figure). I’ve since migrated to putting everything behind forward_auth/Authelia which is even more secure in some ways (2FA!) and even more painless, especially on my phone/tablet.

Sadly reverse proxy authentication doesn’t work with most apps (though it works with PWAs, even if they’re awkward about it sometimes), so I have an exception that allows Jellyfin through if it’s on a VPN/local network (I don’t have it installed on my phone anyway):

@notapp {
  not {
    header User-Agent *Jellyfin*
    remote_ip 192.160.0.0/24 192.168.1.0/24
  }
}
forward_auth @notapp authelia:9091 {
  uri /api/verify?rd=https://authelia.example
}

It’s nice being able to access everything from everywhere without needing to deal with VPNs on Android^ and not having to worry too much about security patching everything timely (just have to worry about Caddy + Authelia basically). Single sign on for those apps that support it is also a really nice touch.

^You can’t run multiple VPN tunnels at once without jailbreaking/rooting Android

Yup, there are many ways of doing that. Most reverse proxies should support basic auth (easy, but browser UX is terrible and it breaks websockets) or TLS client auth (even worse browser UX, phones are awful).

The best thing is do something like Caddy + Authelia (which is what I currently do with most things, with exceptions for specific user agents and IPs for apps that require it, aka non-browser stuff like Jellyfin),

An RSS reader (I use Miniflux), ended up being extremely useful

• Almost every piece of software worth selfhosting has an RSS feed for updates (e.g., every GitHub releases page has an RSS feed). I started selfhosting a good deal more after setting up Miniflux.
• Like omg there is this whole internet out there outside of Reddit/Twitter/etc that does RSS. The vast majority of blogs have RSS (e.g., Wordpress and Substack). I wish I had discovered RSS decades ago, so many websites I’ve forgotten because I would check updates manually and eventually just forget. I even host a personal Nitter instance so I can follow Twitter people in Miniflux.