Wow, as someone who has been hosting XMPP for family for 10+ years and only liking it, I’m amazed by the overwhelmingly supportive comments for it, it’s like people are recovering from a Matrix hangover and rediscovering the things they already had for their merit. So yeah that’s my +1: XMPP is really something dependable, it just works, and the sysadmin story is great too (my preference goes to ejabberd for the best “turnkey” experience, but you can’t go wrong with prosody either if you are willing to read some guide).

You don’t have to be on the NAS’ physical network to run some tests, if you can SSH into it, that’s enough to run some speed tests and latency tests to reference servers (e.g. Google, netflix, …), while doing the same from your PC simultaneously. Whenever you encounter “instabilities” you should be able to see which side of the connection is struggling more than usual. You should also be able to monitor the NAS itself for excessive IO or CPU using something like htop (even though that would be rather extraordinary if all that’s going on with it at that time is a Borg backup).

On the topic of Kopia, you can go the easy route of setting up a SFTP remote pointing to your NAS. All you need is SSH access to the NAS (so your current tailscale/borg set-up qualifies as is) and a folder where the SSH user can write. You can then compare backup times vs. Borg (in my use case, going from 18-25min with Borg down to 3-5min with Kopia). If you then want to try the HTTP repository server, there is a container for that, but the set-up is a bit annoying (the password to decrypt the repo needs to be stored on the NAS, you need to generate a SSL certificate pair and have the client whitelist the sha256sum of it, etc). Personally I haven’t found a substantial advantage to having the http repository server but YMMV.

Tailscale being merely a wrapper around Wireguard, which is pretty close to optimally efficient, I don’t think there’s much of an improvement to be expected by rolling your own or hopping over your VPS. You should probably start with investigating what’s causing the tailscale connection instability (is it your ISP? Is it the network on the side of the NAS?). If you are not bound to Borg, perhaps you can give a shot at Kopia, I found it to be much more performant for my use-cases, and it has a http “repository server” which you might be able to use with less protocols overhead than through your current setup.

Or plain old CalDAV

It’s there on the readme: https://hacdias.com/2026/07/28/filebrowser/

The project needs a rewrite from scratch, but the author had enough.

How does that compare to wallabag? (Does it?)

If you want notes “sometimes on the web, sometimes local first”, and possibly more than just notes (with the tools to extend into an actual knowledge base), you might be better served by https://triliumnotes.org/

I’m holding off on Fluxer until they decide how they’re going to implement federation

Seems wise. They seem competent in the front-end/client space and complete amateurs in the (difficult) protocol space. There is no example of successful tech (that I know of) that successfully added federation/P2P after the fact. It’s not an afterthought, it probably won’t ever happen.

Don’t do Element, Matrix is a nightmare (and a significant commitment) to self host. Other servers (recently, continuwuity) are a bit better on that front, but then you run into compatibility issues and edge cases as a forever second-tier citizen.

My advice is to just go with XMPP and ejabberd, and you will find clients for all kinds of usages and people (a free-er WhatsApp takes you to Conversations/Quicksy/Cheogram/Monocles/Monal, a better banquet/IRC-style rooms takes you to gajim/fluux, social networking and group calling takes you to Movim, etc).

Personally my needs are covered by Monocles on Android, Gajim on the PC, and Movim on occasions. Using multiple clients around the same protocol and account is a strength, not a weakness.

To add to the collection of chat apps enabling that, there is XMPP, too: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.monocles.chat/

It’s not as dramatic as GP makes it, but Matrix had been at the prototyping stage and at figuring out its core protocol and state resolution algorithm for more than a decade now, it’s pretty ridiculous in itself.

Isn’t that the premise of the “$4 ubuntu over droplet deployment” option?

Instead of having Secluso-Deploy ssh into some cloud box and prep it up with the server-side software, why not have a container deployment option as well? I get that you want to ensure that the server is publicly reachable for the mobile clients to work on the go, but ultimately (and in all honesty) at this point, that should be a user concern/choice (those more advanced users may be peculiar about running behind tailscale, a home-VPN, a port-routing config, …).

Needless to say, most people here might find it easier to work with containers and build trust in the project by having it run in an isolated environment with limited permissions than blindly trusting that the code is what it says it is and not quietly running a botnet at digitalocean with their PII attached.

Hoping this goes somewhere https://github.com/containerd/containerd/issues/13307

+1 on babybuddy, I’ve only good things to say about it and its community. Also, it’s a Django app, so the bar to tweak it exactly the way you want is very very low.

You seem angry. It’s just too bad you couldn’t funnel this energy into learning and configuring nextcloud to your needs. It is actually pretty lean when you set it up properly. Anyhow, happy you found something you liked eventually.

Prosody is a great piece of software, and so is ejabberd which offers some perks. I can’t speak for the other servers (mongooseim, openfire, tigase, …) which I haven’t tried in a long time,

All that’s to say that it’s amazing that we get so many well maintained and compatible servers (and clients) implementations in XMPP-land, and all the implications for its healthy future.

I won’t say that FreeCAD has a good UX, but it helps a lot NOT to look at it as a CAD software, but as a collection of specialized engineering tools, organized into workspaces, haphazardly put together.

First thing you need to know is which workspace you’ll need, and FreeCAD does a terrible job at explaining you that (the concept of workspaces isn’t self explanatory) AND describing what each and every one of them does. Some of which should just be disabled by default because of how fringe, unpolished or unreliable they are.

Once you’ve got that part cleared, you can learn the primitives and the jargon (what’s a body, solid, part, mesh, element, …), not great, but fair. Then, you have to learn, for every workbench, what their workflow is (e.g. create a body, create a sketch, apply transformations ; Create an analysis, define material, define loads, add a mesh, add solver, add equations, run solver, add results, tweak the pipeline so it renders, show results), and yep, FreeCAD won’t hold your hand for any of that, you’ll have to wear your explorer hat and navigate from frustration to incomprehension until it accidentally works.

But then, if you can get over that, you’ll end-up with a tool that’s more powerful and versatile than anything else, including dandy commercial offerings. It still blows my mind that nowadays anyone in their garage can do for free what not so long ago would require a full engineering curriculum and corporate sponsorship to acquire licenses. My hope is that FreeCAD would gain the same kind of visibility that Blender enjoys, with sufficient funds for a small dev team and a great product manager.