Neither my wife nor I are very tidy people so our house is usually pretty messy. I (a guy) clean and tidy more than she does but neither of us are great for it.

Many do, and many want something else. Personally the uncertainty around banking apps working is what keeps me away from GrapheneOS.

I run OpenMediaVault as it brings plenty of nice features together like SMART disk monitoring, resource usage monitoring, easy RAID creation, FTP/SSH/browser access, etc. You don’t strictly need it (or TrueNAS, UnRAID, etc) but it’s nice. Unlike TrueNAS and others, OMV seems easier to install on an existing Linux distribution (I run it on Debian).

For important stuff that you really don’t want to lose, you probably want to set up a RAID array of some description. The various NAS solutions like OMV or TrueNAS will make that easier but you can do it without them. It does mean you’ll want a lot of storage (disks will probably be the most expensive part of your setup) and you’ll want your PC to be able to accommodate multiple hard drives (I would think at least 4) particularly if you want to run a RAID.

Jellyfin is good for streaming. Beyond that I don’t know much about sailing the seas at scale.

Nextcloud is decent for file storage and has a few good addons that allow you to use it to selfhost calendars, contact, Joplin notes, etc.

Paperless-ngx is a good solution for digitising documents.

Yes there are plenty of different solutions out there but after a while you come to see that as a feature rather than a bug. Selfhosting definitely carries a lot more friction than outsourcing it all to Google, so it’s something you need to get used to. It helps if you can view the process itself as a hobby rather than a chore and embrace the fact that you will need to learn a lot to make it work.

European here. Germans just think their beer is the best in the world and if you’re not doing it like them, you’re not doing it right.

Don’t get me wrong, the standards Germans apply to their beer production means that it’s rare to get a terrible beer there, but IMO it’s also not that innovative and the range of styles is fairly limited. There is a ton of choice in the US both in terms of breweries and styles. The variation means you get more duds but also more excellent beers.

I suspect the large majority of people who use the Fediverse don’t want to be publicly trackable in this way. It would be fine for me if the people who did stayed on Facebook. To me, it’s not a goal that 100% (or any %) of Facebook users move to the Fediverse. What is important is just that the Fediverse has a critical mass of activity that it doesn’t completely die.

Also, maybe it’s just me (I’d be interested to hear what others think) but I think trying to track down old school or college friends is really something people only want to do for a few years. By the time I hit my mid 20s I didn’t really care anymore. There are people from school I sometimes think about and wonder where they are now, but ultimately, if I never tracked them down and they never tracked me down in the years since, the connection was clearly not that important.