Sorry if this sounds like a conspiracy theory, but how do we know that BlueSky isn’t padding their stats with internal bots? I could see this being a viable strategy to attract users and overcome the social network bootstrapping problem.

How can you tell?

I think Kodi is a good choice, but not really sufficient for everything you might want to do IMO.

You could also look into KDE Plasma Bigscreen. It’s still pretty rough around the edges, but I think it aims to do what you want.

I am actually thinking about building something similar with different tech, as I’m not satisfied with any of the existing options. I really want something that’s primarily controlled via a mobile Web interface like the Kore app for Kodi.

Nothing about networking?