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 was away from home and had the opportunity to test this out. Mind you, I do have a subdomain pointed to my instance so it knew to use that, but even so, it connected perfectly fast via the Iroh app. I use the beta Home Assistant app and lately it's been taking some time to load. Your app beats it to the punch with load times.

Thank you for putting this one out there!

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.

The thing about Tuya devices is they are a white label provider which allows manufacturers to brand the Tuya Device as their own. This is causing a massive saturation in markets such as Amazon where the lower price is king. I had some Costco 'Feit" branded bulbs which turned out to set up on Tuya so it's not just Amazon or Costco, other companies do it as well. I have a WiFi dehumidifier I bought before I got into the home automation scene which is Tuya based. They often masquerade behind apps such as SmartLife, Uhome or Feit and others with their GUI using nothing more than API Calls to the Tuya servers in China.

You can still obtain the local product keys on Tuya Developer portal which allows you to locally control your devices without the cloud, but they are making that harder to find. i was able to track some down about a month ago on a device I was evaluating. You can use other plugins too which decouple it from the cloud with your local key such as Xtended-Tuya, Tuya-Local and the like in Home Assistant so you can technically ignore the comms to China and I've found that some of those in tandem with each other have unlocked some extra features that the Tuya app never reveals for the device.

Ultimately, they are a very cost effective device to install in your home and often times you don't know it's Tuya Based until you poke around. I'm not defending them in any way, rather I am stating my observations and thoughts as to why it's so pervasive. I wouldn't be surprised if some Ovens or refrigerators were linked in some way to them as well.

I have mine connected to Logitech Z553 speakers which my PC uses. The speakers have great sound and very impressive bass response rivaling high end speakers. The volume control knob has an aux input on it so I can feed an external source to the speakers. I then used a 3.5mm male to male audio cable to connect the Voice PE to the input on the speakers. This has created rich sounding voice responses. :) I use the Nabu Casa cloud voices and the Candadian Voice "Liam" which sounds good with these speakers. The speaker is in my living room which our main area and where the voice PE is so it makes sense to be there.