shrugal

Not OP, but when I was looking for an alternative it was the music analysis and Auto-Playlist/DJ features that set Plexamp apart.

Nothing wrong with having to pay for software if the prices are reasonable. It's a product like any other, with real people working on it.

The simple answer is: Yes! If you want to be completely sure no one is accessing your data - now or in the future - then you have to host it yourself. There are companies and countries that are more trustworthy/safe than others, but you never know how politics will change.

I've been using a Synology NAS for ages, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it! Especially if you don't have that much experience with Linux and servers, but also if you want something that's more Plug-n-Play and stable, or you want access to some of their proprietary services or really good customer support. Just make sure you get one that supports Docker, because that's how you'll install most if not all of the 3rd party services.

That being said, building one yourself can also be great fun, and you do have that one additional level of control if everything is open-source and installed by you.

if I can get it working

It's really as simple as starting one container per chat service, with a config like this:

services:
    beeper-<service>:
        image: ghcr.io/beeper/bridge-manager
        restart: unless-stopped
        environment:
            - MATRIX_ACCESS_TOKEN=<your beeper matrix token>
            - BRIDGE_NAME=sh-<service>
        volumes:
            - ./beeper-<service>:/data

then messaging the @sh-<service>bot:beeper.local bot user, and logging in to your chat account.

I'm using the Beeper Matrix server, but self-host their bridges. That way the de- and reencryption is done on my server, and Beeper only sees encrypted Matrix messages. It's extremely easy to set up if you've used docker before, much less work than running a full Matrix server yourself.

I opened specific ports where needed, and also limit most frontends to local requests only.

I'm using the DS920+, as it's still the best 4-bay Synology NAS for media streaming/encoding tasks afaik. Caches are read-write, and do use the NVMe slots.

The RAM upgrade and added caches definitely made a huge difference. The system is averaging around 70% RAM usage, and goes beyond that for certain tasks, so the current workload wouldn't really be feasible without the extra RAM. And the caches really make most IO operation noticably faster, especially random drive access e.g. from multiple simultaneous processes.

I have some Arr containers on there, as well as Plex, Audiobookshelf, AppFlowy, some Beeper Matrix bridges, FileFlows for media conversion, my own Piped instance, SearXNG, Vaultwarden, FirefoxSync, and a few smaller ones.

I switched the account in the app, so it should use it and fetch content from LW.

I agree with everyone here that self-hosting email is never easy, but if you still decide to go down this route then here are two tips that I personally found very helpful, especially when you decide to host it at home:

The first is to get an SMTP relay server. That's just another mail server that yours can log into to actually send its mail, just like an email client would. That way you don't have to worry about your IP's sending reputation, because everyone will only see the relay's reputable IP.

Second is to configure a Backup MX. That's an additional MX DNS entry with lower priority than the primary, and it points to a special mail server that accepts any mail for you and tries to deliver it to the primary server forever (or something like an entire week). So when your primary server is unreachable other sending servers will deliver mail to the backup, and it delivers the mail to the primary as soon as that's back online.

You can get these as separate services, but some DNS providers (like Strato for example) offer both with the base domain package. It makes self-hosting an email server much simpler and more reliable in my experience.

That was my first thought as well! But I also tried LW which is still on 0.19.3, same problem.

Edit: My bad! I had "show read posts" enabled on my LW account, and read posts are correctly hidden when I disable it. So it really seems to be a problem with the new version.

Welcome to the Linux community. :)

You will probably never understand everything about Linux and all of its included and associated systems. That's completely fine, no one does! That's why we are many, and it's what asking for advice or help is for. You can just learn whatever interests you at your own pace, and know that there will always be interesting things you haven't seen yet.

I really like the idea of creating a decentralized network that has a fair monetization model built right in, instead of relying on donations like the Fediverse. Crypto got a very bad rep, but this kind of stuff is exactly what it's good for imo.

It also has some core features that are missing from other similar messengers, like multi-device sync. And lastly, the devs seem pretty capable and open as well. They are very transparent with their work and seem to have the right ideas about where things should go and which trade-offs to make. E.g. their reasoning for not using the Signal protocol seems solid to me.

So I'm hopeful, but time will tell if it all works out.