The Fediverse is the future.
Yeah personally I’m not a fan and I would rather follow a well-written guide than spend even more time auditing such a script (which would be even more difficult if you’re not experienced with Proxmox). For maintenance’s sake it’s also risky getting your service set up like this as you don’t know how the script set things up and it’s harder to fix things if they go wrong.
I virtualize my NAS because it’s small (only several TB) and therefore it can be backed up like any other VM with PBS or dumped as a qcow image. A full restoration is extremely easy because I can simply have another node pull the backup from PBS. Also I can migrate the entire NAS to another node so it stays up when I have downtime.
TIFF is a classic storage format, but PNG is common for web images and isn’t going away either. DNG is for RAW sensor output from professional cameras and is not used for edited and published images. However if you’re archiving your photo collection or something than keep the DNGs!
I run a non-federated Matrix server for my family with synapse, it’s behind nginx and the setup is pretty straightforward if you know what you’re doing. It does chat, voice, and video with screenshare nicely, though I don’t know now well it scales to a large group.
I’m really going to miss /r/writingprompts, I’ve written a lot of stuff for them over the years. Sadly I don’t see a replacement popping up here yet and their mods also didn’t bother with the blackout protest.
How would you compare it to Matrix? I use Matrix and have never tried XMPP.