I made the assumption that anyone reading this would be or know at least one IT person. To the other questions, nobody will beat Facebook at convenience and av

I made the assumption that anyone reading this would be or know at least one IT person. To the other questions, nobody will beat Facebook at convenience and availability. Any self-hosted solution loses out of the gate if those are the criteria. But if you see using Facebook as making a deal with the devil, maybe you're willing to put up with some downtime and inconvenience to avoid the alternative. Giving up some convenience is pretty much the tradeoff for any security-conscious decision. TOR will always be slower than a direct connection, but you get anonymity (as long as you use it smartly).