I’ve always been conservative about what kind of services I host because it takes time to get them set up. For example, there’s no reason for me to set up music streaming when I only ever listen to music on my phone and all my music files are already on my phone. On the other hand, it’s a good learning opportunity to set stuff up and have to fix it when it breaks. What do you think?
I’m hosting Photoprism, now. But man, do I just barely use it. I’m not a photographer, and I always have the worst camera of anyone around me, so I’m never taking pictures. It’s running, and I’m not taking it down. But it did teach me to use docker compose. I switched everything I had after that.
Matrix was one that was hard to justify. It was just too heavy. My dream has always been “use one app for all communication”. I bridged Signal, Discord, and Facebook. Problem number 1 was that SMS is like impossible to set up. Problem 2 no one uses Signal except me and my wife. Problem 3 was that my Facebook got flagged for suspicious activity, and they wanted my ID to recover it. I used this as a chance to ditch Facebook, but I also ditched Matrix at this time. Signal supports SMS, so I could do more with it than Matrix. I’ll probably try again down the line.
My most used service is definitely my music service, Navidrome. You might try it, it’s very light. I used to keep all my files on my phone like you. And my phone had an SD slot, so storage wasn’t an issue. But I couldn’t listen from any of my computers, or at work. After I made the switch, I painstakingly re-‘aquired’ all of my music in FLAC, and have my phone set with a size limit of music to cache, as well as always downloading my favorites.
I don’t think signal supports sms any longer. I’m switching to matrix because of that.
I had the exact same issue with Facebook (literally only have it for marketplace), they kept de-activating my account. The signal bridge has worked perfectly for me though. The SMS bridges worked for me, but they were SO SLOW. And pictures didnt work either.