There are two main ways you can do it. You’ve already mentioned you have your library/music files, so that’s a good start, you’re basically looking for a way to access it on other devices. The first way would be to set up an old PC/rent a cloud server, and set up the service you want to use, though for now this may be a bit too complex if all you want to do is stream your own music, and have no experience. That being said, it’s always good to have a look and see, there may be a tutorial that works for you if you want to go down this route.

You’ve mentioned Navidrome, and it’s a good shout, basically just looks at the folders of music you have, and lets you stream them to your phone/PC (and more) like Spotify or Google Music. For the simplest possible setup, I’d recommend a service like Pikapods (https://pikapods.com), which essentially selfhosts applications for you, and gives you access to the files. For Navidrome, for 50GB storage (and the recommended settings of 1 CPU core and 0.5GB RAM), it’s $3.01 a month, which, though not free, is very affordable if that’s all you want to do, plus they handle updates, etc. You shouldn’t need to set any variables, and can upload your music to their service via FTP (File Transfer Protocol, a way to copy files to another PC/server from your PC), and they have docs on how to do that on the site.

Hope this helps :P

No categories, only available navigation option is “Random”, let chaos commence

My friends use Element since it has become a lot less buggy in my experience in the last few months, and is feature rich. Given the apparent requirements (calls, location sharing, etc), I don’t know if there are any other android clients that offer everything you’re looking for. If it’s been a bit since you’ve used Element, I would try it again. Could even have unencrypted (group chat) rooms depending on security requirements since all accounts will be on your instance to avoid encryption issues.

100% agree and am baffled at the lack of remote play for any network, since that’s something that would make this product a lot more worthwhile, though still at a premium I can’t see many people paying for.

How to unsee meme

...I made it xD

Agreed, I hoped back into it a week ago just to try it out, and felt as balanced as it was, so no complaints

Honestly, right now it’s Overwatch 2. Probably Stockholm syndrome at this point, but the game can still be fun to just jump into for 30 minutes for me.

I’ll do the same :D

Golden Trash Can

For something such as PiHole, your main machine may be overkill honestly. It can run on literally potatoes (or raspberries). That being said, if the price of keeping your machine on is not an issue, it's perfectly reasonable to run something on it whenever it'll be needed. If possible, potentially a smaller computer like a Raspberry Pi may work for this, or even a small online VPS (cloud server).

For me, something like PiHole for DNS-based Adblocking, as well as potentially a Wireguard/OpenVPN installation (via PiVPN potentially) for an easy adblocking VPN combination. Depends on the available bandwidth, however, but some lower powered applications, even up to a small personal Matrix Synapse server could be viable on 1GB Ram if not abused.