I have tried every possible set up, I’ve got to say that the best one so far for me is sychthing + Koreader: dead simple, no databases, synchs annotations and highlights as well, books are simply epub files + metadata.

Aka no dealing with exports, database corruption or stuff like that.

In my experience matrix is a total mess with plenty of bugs, also uses quite a lot server resources. xmpp is lighter, easier to set up and works flawlessly, and seem also easier to proxy or do stuff like that with it. Calls are kinda messy to set up tho.

I couldn’t make it work whatever I did, whichever instance I used it seemed to get rate limited after a while or showing weird results…

I guess getting a flip phone and stick to an eBook reader would be a good solution

Use a reverse proxy to proxy everything through https, then you can install how many services you want. Caddy is super simple, you can reverse proxy with just 1 line.

For calendar and contacts (caldav, cardav) Baikal is extremely easy to install and use. And pretty minimal.

As far as I knew reverse proxies could only reverse proxy stuff coming in from 443 or 80, I didn’t know they could listen other ports as well!

Main reason why I was using a reverse proxy at first is because I had everything behind cloudflare, and cloudflare can only proxy and give you an SSL encryption for stuff that goes through 443, so I could make Caddy listen to 443 and then forward to interested ports.

But this leaves out everything that needs to go in some other places than 443, and requires its own standalone ssl certificate, which is a bit cumbersome. Pheraps these can be proxied with other proxies than cloudflare, hopefully giving SSL to everything…

I’m not sure I understood the upstream ssh thing, what do you actually do?

Self hosting IS hard, don’t beat yourself too much because of it… After all you’re trying to serve services for yourself that are usually served by companies with thousands of employees.

A server requires knowledge, maintainance and time, it’s okay to feel frustrated sometimes.

How is the user experience compared to matrix? Is it easy to gateway towards matrix or other services? Can I easily join matrix or other communities servers?

I see a lot of people are now using matrix but not so many xmpp, but yeah it hoggs resources on my server too. Also I feel like it’s still pretty buggy…