Same here in terms of don’t want to touch mail. I use migadu, swiss company hosting in france. Works flawlessly. There was a good blogpost some time ago comparing mail services, let me check… there it is: Blogpost

+1 for Joplin. Sync via webdav-server (nginx, nextcloud) or their sync server. Works like a charm.

Join the matrix room, they like to help out.

This. Its not that hard to setup.

I‘m an old fart using FreeBSD and jails, in the jails mostly bare metal install. Home assistant runs in bhyve, one docker app (audiobookshelf) runs in bhyve as well (alpine linux and docker)

Writefreely can be selfhosted. simple config, no themes (or limited if i remember correctly). But it just works.

Have a look at Silverbullet, selfhosting is fairly easy, using it on one device (offline) as well. Watch the videos, it’s quite powerful.