The only real alternative is iOS, which extremely restrictive and limiting, UI is unintuitive and clunky to navigate, and a lack of Quality-of-life enhancing apps (like better keyboards or apps to password protect other apps)

There’s a bunch of small things that always get in the way. Lack of file system access for example, or FOSS app options.

What about for services that is made public for anyone to use? VPN would not make sense here

Lemmy is still in active development and there are some missing features, but it is very usable. Your friends’ complaints, some are a bit exaggerated and some are really not that big of issues that will get resolved eventually.

I use rsync, and for android I use rsync via Termux and cron.

This method gives me a ton of customization and control so I really enjoy it :)

This wouldn’t work for iPhone though :(

Gitea
Backups via rsync
Jellyfin
Piped for YouTube

Using gentoo Linux with raspberry pi 4B