Completely sympathize with the reasoning behind this. Have done similar myself, trying to make the most of low-resource software to run on low-powered hardware

Completely sympathize with the reasoning behind this. Have done similar myself, trying to make the most of low-resource software to run on low-powered hardware. Self-hosting email, while a PITA at times (must use mailinabox next time... but spf, dmarc, tls everywhere wasn't too bad to set up, just the multiple accounts were fun) is extremely satisfying. And no, it doesn't mostly end up in a gmail inbox. But even if it does, Prism leaks resulted in Google de-pwning themselves (internal encryption), supposedly. For now, etc. Otherwise RSS (newsbeuter), XMPP (finch), email (mutt), IRC (irssi), Drupal with nginx + php opcode caching + microcaching, Hugo sites with nginx, letsencrypt/certbot. SSH tunnels for socks and remote connections. Cheap router with tomato firmware... Quite amazing what you can run on a pi, router and low end VPS with a bit of time and effort. Even transitioning much of my word processing to markdown/latex/pandoc for dead simple clean and quick publishing. I may be completely deluded, but for me the future is still the command line, low powered hardware and FOSS. Its strength is in its fluid development that seems able to endure decades of change and advances, weathering rises and falls of shinier things. More power to the OP, may many more share their non-shiny setups.