The problem playing devil’s advocate is you’re defending the devil. Running to the all or nothing edge is simply an attempt to end the discussion. “If Nazis can’t have privacy, nobody can.” There is an in-between, and conveniently it’s called moderation.
Are we equally of the opinion that hate speech should not be moderated? Are threats without action to be defended unilaterally? It’s not important what the answers are, it’s that there is a world in between absolutist ideals. There are alternatives. We can discuss them.
Companies are also capable of navigating this space, and should be responsible for doing so if they are entitled to their platform. The idea that their hands are tied to all or nothing is ignorant if not apologist. If the best you can do with 10’s of millions of dollars is helplessness, perhaps you deserve all the criticism. The devil needs better attorneys.
Headscale, for one. This is probably implied as part of one of your above stacks, but let’s list it out loud. Tailscale is great and all, but it’s downright icky to offload routing of any variety to a third party.
Immich. Turn off Apple or Google’s automatic scraping of all photos, keep usability. Even if you’re not a photo person, at least some of your users are.
Syncthing is or Nextcloud, or something in the family. This may already be part of your NAS plans.
One of the code forges like forgejo, gitea, gitlab. Even when not a developer. Self hosting involves configuration and if you can get that into text and into a history, it makes things so much easier. Add bells and whistles to your hearts content, but these are good suites for a lot of functionality. Forgejo does have federation on its road map, but it’s a while off still.
These are ones I find pretty ubiquitous. There’s so many options once you have initial infrastructure. Email, for instance, isn’t as daunting as the horror stories make it sound, though not as simple as many hope. My suggestion is to take time and do it correctly. There’s a lot of backtracking involved as you learn more, but it’s usually worth it. Best of luck!