The battery turning into a Spicy pillow is always a Concern for using laptop as an always powered on server. So even though you will be away from it, make sure that there is a way for someone to keep an eye on it, once every week or two.
That said, I have been using a dell laptop as a desk workstation (and remote use) with an uptime of 2.5 years at this point.
I also use syncthing. And it works pretty well. There is some turmoil with the android version in light of changes so the underlying sdk. And I am not sure there is an iOS syncthing that would work as well. I actually use it primarily to sync my keepass databases, and before Immich, my photos.
The photo management Immich brings makes it a nice alternative for that use case, but either way I need to have one or more servers elsewhere managing storage so I can get things off of my phone into a system I can control.
I use Immich because I have multiple devices and multiple people uploading photos to it , so we can all organize together.
Self hosting anything also gives you a lot of practice and experience (and confidence) to also self hosting anything for others, an important skill for many to have in order to have a more distributed internet.
/me pines for the days of protocol over interface. NNTP + killfiles were the bees knees. Then we could just all pick our own interface to connect to any lemmy host.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Writer Cory Doctorow coined the neologism “enshittification” in November 2022, though he was not the first to describe and label the concept.[1][2] The American Dialect Society selected it as its 2023 Word of the Year.
Revolt is kinda “centralized”. You can host your own version, but they seem to actively discourage you from doing so.
https://github.com/jgraph/drawio/blame/dev/LICENSE <-- that’s … a rather specific and recent change. Is there a story here ?
You are aware that draw.io is itself open source and self-hostable: https://github.com/jgraph/drawio ?
At $dayjob I switched from Apache to nginx 15+ years ago. It’s Callback/Event based process model ran circles around Apache’s pre-fork model at the time. It was very carefully developed to be secure, and even early on it had a good track record. Being able to have nginx handle static content without tying up a backend worker process was huge, and let us scale our app pretty well for the investment of time. Since then, Apache implemented threaded + Event based process models, Caddy, traefik, and a bunch of others have entered the scene.
TBH, I think the big thing nowadays is sane defaults, and better configuration, even automatically discovered configuration – traefik is my current favorite for discovering hosts in consul/Kubernetes/simple host definition files, but since traefik can’t directly serve files, I simply proxy from traefik to … nginx :)
Navidrome is another server that works pretty well, implements the subsonic protocol ( so all the apps that can cache and stream to your mobile device work). You can have multiple logins, or just share out playlists and albums individually to non-authenticated users.
MoCA is a way to send wired Ethernet up to (300mb/s, at least the version i have) over coax. Verizon fios would provide these devices to send internet to set top boxes over existing coax cabling, but you can get a pair of these devices and send Ethernet in on one side, and Ethernet out the other side.
I have noticed however, it adds a bit of latency to the connection, which may be trouble.
Depending on your use cases and apps, file locking can be problematic when sharing across SMB and NFS simultaneously, their locking semantics are slightly different
TacticalRMM is very comprehensive, self hosted, but more geared towards organizations managing a fleet of machines.
In fact, it can be better: having root means you can arrange additional ‘firewalls’ between apps and your data , or omit/falsify sensor data the the banking app should not need, that the Google is unwilling to implement.
Seconding fetchmail. It’s configuration is quite elaborate for a whole bunch of situations. I’ve used it in a small office situation to pull email from their legacy ISP’s POP into an internal IMAP server, so they could have multiple clients sharing mailboxes. (And so they couldn’t set weak passwords on an internet-connected system :-/ )