File storage, mainly. I have 2 NAS devices (one Synology I picked up in 2014, and an Unraid device I just built a couple months ago) - the former holds 13TB and the latter currently holds 35TB with plans to bring it to 100TB as I get money for more drives.
The Unraid system has a Youtube-dl instance running to auto-pull videos from the channels I follow, and I also run my Plex server from it. The Synology only has a Git server on it that I use to keep local copies of repos that I store on GitHub, along with personal projects that I’d rather not publish (even as private repos) in the cloud.
The platform is fine and being able to subscribe across Lemmy instances is nice (i.e. I’m not even on Beehaw but here I am anyway) - it just needs more users and content.
The main issue is going to be getting that critical mass of users, especially on a platform that isn’t quite as straightforward as a centralized one. Trying to explain how Lemmy works to my wife just left her confused and wondering what the point was. Getting people like her to make the jump to a federated platform is going to take time, effort, and - most importantly - content.