That is true. I have only managed to convince my wife to use it but I had to set it up for her. Now we can chat about what to eat for dinner securely though 😄

I have done the same and it is amazing.

Self-hosting Immich as an alternative to Google Photos is amazing, I love it!

For DNS I use Pi-hole with Unbound which is used to contact the DNS root servers directly and recursively find IP-addresses. The first lookup becomes a little bit slower than through say Google but the IP is then cached locally and then it actually becomes faster. This is also more private since it doesn’t require a third-party DNS resolver.

I would go with SimpleX instead of Signal since it is very secure and you can self-host the server. There are no user IDs. Here is the official website: https://simplex.chat/