Nick

You can use their public server if you want, otherwise you can spin up your own on a cheap/free VPS.

You install the ntfy app on your phone and subscribe to channels which then can/will alert.

It works, but isn’t nearly as user friendly.

Headscale running as it’s own user with tailscale ACLs. Tailscale calls home to headscale via HTTPS and gets the info. Assuming the person doesn’t get root access it’s should be fairly safe. With tailscale ACLs you set up whicu systems can reach where. Also don’t forgot you can use UFW/iptables in each client that way it’s still locked down.

I was happy with Cloudfanatic.

For servers autorestic just worked. It’s a wrapper for restic. I sent data to backlaze B2 and StorJ. Now that I have a couple proxmox hosts in a colo, I have an off-site PBS running in ZFS.rent.

First VMs back up to local PBS , then nightly that’s synced to ZFS.rent. I have PVE set to do encrypted backups to PBS so it’s all encrypted.

Yeah unfortunately iOS is very stingy with battery. Thankfully there’s a few apps that use apples push and ejabberd supports it. I haven’t tested them in a while tho since I’m on android.

Mattermost is great and I’m pretty sure they have an iOS app. I don’t believe the messages are encrypted on MM, but if you’re running the infra it’s not too big of a deal IMHO.

I run ejabberd for myself and my family/friend and use conversations on android. Mattermost I would say is the most like discord. I run one of those as well and love it.