Sure. I also don’t want to shit talk XMPP. I prefer XMPP over Matrix any day. But it can be tricky (just like Matrix; which is funny, since Matrix set out to improve on the mistakes they claimed XMPP made).

The beauty of XMPP is this: you can use any server, and any client, and you can talk to anyone connected to the larger XMPP network, even if they made different server/client choices than you did.

That’s a very optimistic and naive view. XMPP consists of a shit ton of extensions, and different clients implement different subsets of these. So it’s very possible that two different clients fail to do an audio or video call, because the other decided to use a different extension than the other for not implement it at all.

Depends on the usecase. If you don’t need chat history for new-joiners, you can work with a single key per group, rotating it whenever someone joins or leaves. Since the server broadcasts a „so-and-so has left/joined“ it might as well include the new key. That key is then used by everyone in the group, so you can still broadcast all messages and don’t have to encrypt them individually.

There are Zigbee buttons that don’t even need batteries. They produce the necessary energy to send a signal from the energy you put into clicking them. Incredible stuff out there.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Discord isn’t E2EE either. Having data under your control even if not encrypted is a big win.

If all your backups are near you, a flood or fire (or even break in) can still cost you all your data. At least one copy should be off-site.

For 7 people you could look into Virola Messenger. Not open source but uses Mumble under the hood and is super lightweight. No electron shit.

XMPP is also still a thing and IMO much easier to host (at least ejabberd is). Look into Movim, which looks quite nice as a discord replacement on top of XMPP.

Oh yeah. Good to know I am not alone with this.

Ah ok, thanks for the clarification. In the end I also use Sunshine for game streaming, but for pure remote desktop access RustDesk is far nicer, since I can also quickly move files back and forth. RDP is even nicer in that regard, where I can remote-mount local devices.

Where does rustdesk not have a good reputation? I see it being recommended regularly and also use it myself heavily. Never had issues or heard about issues (that I would attribute to reputation).

True. The default rocksdb is completely unusable on HDDs. For me it runs pretty good with PostgreSQL. Dovecot was certainly easier to handle with its file based storage and was super fast. But Postfix was a pain and I can’t count how often it bit me over the years (and since it’s SMTP, that means something broke in receiving, delivery or was suddenly a spam vector, which all sucks quite hard).

Stalwart

Written in rust, contains SMTP, IMAP, JMAP, Sieve, CalDAV, CardDAV, WebDAV. Has an admin web ui. Sane defaults, minimal foot guns. No zoo of containers needed.

I use Kopia to perform incremental encrypted backups (with some retention policy of up to two years) and store them on Backblaze B2, which is reasonably cheap.

That’s what I like about Siyuan and Affine. I can have journal-like daily notes to quickly dump thoughts, but I can then re-arrange or cross-reference individual blocks in(to) other pages, that in turn can be in a nested folder structure and/or tagged. I can quite flexibly mix and match organization structures.

That, on the other hand, is only viable, if you are sure, data never needs to expire. Dedicated backup solutions work with retention policies.

Where I could see an LLM being useful is categorizing entries and maybe proposing sanitization (for example when the payment provider uppercases or abbreviates stuff)

From maybe to definitely not.

SiYuan or Affine. Both have daily notes and normal notes. You can move and reference blocks between documents. That way I can start unstructured (just bullet points in a daily note) and then later either add cross references or start moving it into structured notes directly.

Just to clarify: OwnCloud or OwnCloud Infinite Scale (OCIS)?