[znpy]

I run 90% of a communication stack on a 10 years old hp microserver gen8. I run a pretty vanilla rocky linux installation and run stuff that’s not available in repositories in unprivileged (rootless) podman containers. I mostly only serve myself.

Mail (postfix/dovecot) is cheap. Most other things i have nextcloud for (with acceptable performance). I ran a matrix server for a while but dropped it since none of my friends used that so it was essentially useless.

I can do most things without relying on big tech.

The expensive parts are:

- disks. I have four disks.

- time to learn stuff (it takes a while but some knowledge lasts pretty much forever)

- time for maintenance

Edit: leaving the big tech is really going DIY, learning how the individual things work and then plumbing them together. Anything other than that is largely snakeoil from what i’ve seen. Some friends tell me modern mid-high end NASes might do some of the things you like.