not even a vegetarian/vegan, and this is not a bad idea at all. a lot more people than I thought need to learn to love their veggies, nuts, beans, etc

I tried both MQTT and just the plain HTTP variant, and I couldn’t get either to work. I’ve fully settled on the latter you mentioned, Traccar. it’s pretty much what I’ve wanted: self-hosted, easy to set up, beautiful web interface. Thanks for the suggestions!

for two reasons, I can’t use this.

1. Android. Me, my family. Our past phones were, our current phones are, and future phones will be Android phones.
2. I’m looking for whatever it may be to be OSS and self-hostable (if the community name didn’t give that implication away)

OwnTracks setup was a bit confusing to me and I never got it working. traccar looks pretty nice though, I’ll check it out!

usually in your router settings you can change local DNS settings. you can set your domains and subdomains to point to your server’s local IP.

although definitely not as configurable, I like the “set it and forget it” idea of DockoVPN

the most “drop-in” replacements I know of aimed towards users (not companies) are

• Matrix + Element Client: Supports E2EE and voice + video chat, it works very well, but the onboarding experience of federated platforms is still confusing for some, and along with that they have to change knowledge of guild/channel type chats to space/room. I don’t use this.
• Tailchat: Very similar experience to Discord while not being it. It’s functionality is extended through plugins. Integrating all the services I use into one app is not as bad of an idea as it sounds, and I like the implementation very much, as do my friends. That being said, it’s, very bare-bones in it’s current state, and not much you can add through said plugins besides voice + video chat and bots. This is what I use right now.
• Spacebarchat: Very very alpha, but the end goal is very promising, that being complete backend compatibility with anything designed for Discord. The official client will not be finished anytime soon, so you have to bring your own Discord-compatible client and modify the endpoints to connect to and get any major use out of a Spacebar instance. Voice and Video chat still isn’t there yet, but most all other things work as expected. I keep my eye on it, and will probably use it later on in it’s more finished stages.

Nearly all of them. Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Vaultwarden, Spacebar, and 2fAuth, all set behind an NGINX Reverse Proxy, SWAG. SWAG made it very easy to set up https and now I can throw anything behind a subfolder or subdomain.