No, but I used this as part of my basis for decision:

https://noteapps.info/apps/compare?note_app=joplin%2Blogseq%2Bobsidian&selected_group=formatting#compare-preface

You can select which notes apps you want to compare features against.

I’ve been a Joplin user and using their Joplin Sync server for a few years now. Last night, I migrated everything over to Obisdian and just finished setting up a self hosted obsidian sync. I will say that the self hosted sync was nothing short of a puzzle for me but finally nailed that down between my phone and desktop app. So, I have the same as Joplin now for that functionality.

What got me started on this little side journey, is I’ve been seeing more and more pretty cool uses for Obsidian and have a lot of great things about it. I’m not dumping Joplin yet, but am giving this a solid try before I make any hasty decisions.

My wife and I use it for our private discussions. We have a high functioning disabled adult daughter which can not live on her own. Anyway, as her caregivers, it gives us a platform to privately discuss different areas which are necessary, but at the same time triggering to her. (For example, she’s very afraid and severely anxious about fire so if we talk about a fire in a business or in the news, it’s there).

Overall, It’s worked perfectly and no issues!

There are other services which should work for you as well. I use one which never requires a regular check in. They even ofter a command line curl or other methods to send your updated IP to it. Think Home Assistant, via a curl or if you have a router with Freshtomator or other which supports such curl, it will work as well.

https://freemyip.com/

I’ve been using them for a few years now and never ever had an issue with uptime or otherwise. My use is just as a backup in the event my VPS goes down which hosts Pangolin (VPS).

Others such as noip.com and such do work well also.

I don’t use this software, but if you don’t mind a little local LLM (or a paid one if that’s your thing), this seems to be a pretty nice one:

https://www.getsubwave.com/

https://github.com/perminder-klair/subwave

It does use icecast for the back end.

I use the docker version of the Joplin Server, it syncs with everything I’ve thrown at it which is a laptop, my Android Phone(s) over the years and my Desktop with no issues. It’s super basic so you just set up an account in the self hosted server and then proceed to login using the Synchronization settings in your Joplin App.

If you have any existing data, Make sure to Back it up First!

This is my compose I use. Sub with your values obviously.

services:
    db:
        image: postgres:15.4-bullseye
        volumes:
            - /mnt/appdata/joplindb:/var/lib/postgresql/data
        ports:
            - "5432:5432"
        restart: unless-stopped
        environment:
            - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres
            - POSTGRES_USER=postgres
            - POSTGRES_DB=joplin
    app:
        image: joplin/server:latest
        depends_on:
            - db
        ports:
            - "22300:22300"
        restart: unless-stopped
        environment:
            - APP_PORT=22300
            - APP_BASE_URL=https://public.url.example.com/
            - DB_CLIENT=pg
            - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres
            - POSTGRES_DATABASE=joplin
            - POSTGRES_USER=postgres
            - POSTGRES_PORT=5432
            - POSTGRES_HOST=db
            - MAILER_ENABLED=1
            - MAILER_HOST=yourmailhost
            - MAILER_PORT=587
            - MAILER_SECURE=0
            - MAILER_AUTH_USER=Your Email user
            - MAILER_AUTH_PASSWORD=Your Super Secret Password
            - MAILER_NOREPLY_NAME=Your No Reply Name (eg:  Noreply box)
            - MAILER_NOREPLY_EMAIL=no reply email address
            - TZ=America/Los_Angeles 
volumes:
  joplindb:

And then in the settings for the sync in the app:

To get there, Go to the Tools > Options > Synchronization

Hopefully this will help. :)

You ask how people handle how many adds are shoved when using their devices. I think it’s due to the slow immersion into them over the years. Early web was mostly banner ads which became flashy and distracting. It started around that time and people being people, most just never really thought different as that’s the way the WWW is.

For those of us who run adblockers or use an ad-blocking DNS, and have done so for many years, it is quite jarring to see the unfiltered ad-infested scape of the web. (Most commonly when installing an new OS and not yet setting up the DNS) Some people are happy with them as every search engine ad link they click works and they go about their merry way.

If you are using Authentik, it will work good, but may be uneccessary if all you want is secure authentication, this is becuase Cloudflare does a “Zero Trust” model in which only approved email addresses, would be able to acess your site which you have to manually approve, otherwise, they get hit with the Cloudflare wall. This is completely free and voluntary!

In terms of Cloudflare, I assume that you have your domain all set up with the DNS servers pointed to Cloudflare from your domain registrar. This is probably the hardest part of it all. Then, it’s just a matter of setting up your redirection to your server. I used to use them but haven’t been in it for about a year now for my domains. They are a good company and will certainly help with your site’s security.

Nginx Proxy Manager is like the reception desk for all traffic, when WWW comes in and asks for site.example.com NPM sees that and matches it up with the IP address/port of your server and sends it on it’s merry way. If you are using Cloudflare Tunnels, and after you install their tunnel adaptor, you can skip NPM and just point to the IP and internal port on your server. Pretty straight forward in that area. They have great documentation on how to do this to get you started.

Basically, if you use Cloudflare tunnels, you can skip NPM and free up some resources if you want as it will be redundant. So, then Authentik comes in and can act as a traffic cop and protect all types of pages, ones with log in and those without.

I’ve been using this for several months, it works very well with Pocket ID. :)

I use Pocket-ID for my OIDC and it was easy to set up with Tailscale, you just have a custom domain which I do and I just login with my OIDC Account which is 100% self hosted on my local server.

I switched from Stirling to this a few months ago and it’s one of those tools you use once in a while, but not all the time. It’s a good tool to have when you need it and I gladly keep it on my server for those just in case times!

I moved my setups to Pangolin and placed it on a VPS and then just have been using it since and is about the same as I could run it with a CDN such as Cloudflare. I know Cloudflare has better security with things but I also use Crowdsec which has been nice for keeping most things away. I host my email through Mxroute so it’s never an issue. While Cloudflare has been very stable for years, this last outage didn’t affect me like it would have, although I’m just use the stuff or my purposes.

I left Cloudflare because I was ready to move away from there and found that Pangolin offered what I was looking for. No hard feelings either way toward Cloudflare at all.

I keep landing back to Proxmox, My primary use is to run the Home Assistant OS VM which is quite fantastic there. And also, I have NFS sharing setup on the Proxmox server so I can share it between my machines and my home Linux boxes. I’m on Proxmox 8 though and not 9. Debian 13 with Proxmox 9 it turns out at least when I tried it, is really locked down now for running Docker via the host. (Proxmox machine) With Proxmox 8, I can still install Docker and run my containers there, then use Portainer to manage them sometimes, but rarely now days. You can also probably do it the “Correct way” as some may believe by setting up a VM or LXC in Promox to host docker containers. I do that with one subset of containers but not all.

Another option you may want to consider is XCP-NG, which is another hypervisor and IMHO ran Home Assistant a tad bit faster for me, but it will not allow you to mount existing drives without erasing them (I can’t do that with my disks). Additionally,  it seems to be on an out of date CentOS build which is no longer updated. (My notes from this are from a year ago when I tried it and I think some of it has changed, but for storage: https://docs.xcp-ng.org/storage/) You can see what’s going on there.

Most people will say to host Truenas or something like that in a VM via Proxmox but honestly, it isn’t too difficult to set up with a tool like Cockpit to manage the shares. I’ve played with most of the setups recently and recently tried going with a Debian 12 install on bare metal with the Home Assistant VM running which I could, but I had more crashes with the server and it never started the VM in spite of being told to do so. I honestly didn’t stick around though, so YMMV if you go that route.

I have been using Proxmox VE with Docker running on the host not managed by Proxmox, and then Cockpit to manage NFS Shares with Home Assistant OS running in a VM. It’s been pretty rock solid. That was until I updated to Version 9 last night, it’s been a nightmare getting the docker socket to be available. I think Debian Trixie may have some sort of extra layers of protection, I haven’t investigated it too much, but my plan tomorrow and this week is to migrate everything to Debian 12 as that’s the tried and true OS for me and I know it’s quite stable with Cockpit, docker and so forth with KVM for my Home Assistant installation.

One other OS for consideration if you are wanting to check it out is XCP-NG which I played with and Home Assistant with that was blazing fast, but they don’t allow NFS shares to be created and using existing data on my drives was not possible, so I would’ve had to format them .

Cloudflare tunnels support higher port numbers. I’ve done it in the past with Portainer. Also Proxmox which listens on 8006. Portainer on 9443.

If your router supports Freshtomato firmware, it also has adguard you can enable too.

You could always use ntfy.sh if you are wanting to keep it light weight, I know there seems to be a heavy following and happy community with it. I personally use Gotify which has been nice and easy to use and just works for my needs. :) I looked at the shoutrrr repo and it seems to be either abandoned or just no longer updating maybe because their is no need to in the Dev’s eyes. They also develop Watchtower which hasn’t been touched in about 2 years ago. I have never had any issues with Watchtower so I think it may not need much maintenance. I do see though that they are working on a new project: https://github.com/containrrr/shepherd but it’s also a bit stale.

To make it seamless so you can still Thunderbird, someone made a Docker image of it here: https://hub.docker.com/r/kebles/wanderbird But, you can probably find a newer release somewhere newer than 4 yrs old like this one. :) The point is, if you are wanting to keep it in the Thunderbird umbrella, then it’s most likely been Dockerized.

I’ve Tried Cypht recently, but if you are using Gmail, it has a conflict there so it won’t work out of the box without some extra work I think.

I can see them doing that, I use a DNS ad-block (Adguardhome) with plenty of filters and last night, I spotted that they were able to inject two ads (standard one to the right of the channels and one at the bottom below the menu for the new Minecraft movie when they changed my background. So, they are finding ways around this stuff. I simply disabled the Sponsored themes. We are on the fence about replacing the TV later this year but not 100% sure just yet. It’s been quite buggy randomly rebooting when switching sources and other things.

Not related to the server, but I was very happily surprised with the latest Roku Jellyfin channel. A complete refresh of everything and it’s great to see it.