If you can’t understand Russian and Ukrainian and are thought-constrained by the Overton window you won’t find much value there. I do, though >95% of everything is drek and you have to have the time and enough built-in analytics between your ears.
Try Telegram and the Moon of Alabama for that.
Reddit who?
No hardware RAID. Use zfs, if you can. Mirror the boot SSD. I would use a stripe over mirror and 4 HDDs. Two drives are not enough redundancy. Use enterprise or nearline drives, if you can. Debian is great, you can install Proxmox on top of it, but from the sound of it plain Debian would work for you.
BSW taking 6% out of box (way more in the East) got to count for something.
Without VPN, they can.