All files stored on IPFS are public. It’s also incredibly slow and inefficient. You would be better off using BitTorrent.

Here is what I used before I switched to desec.io: https://gist.github.com/haansn08/50565768c66c5fbf382b2bc2484e8a41

Texstudio + git > Overleaf

Sync between devices. I only read RSS on one device so I don’t need it either. Besides if you don’t think a service is useful to you why do you host it?

But it gets easier with every thing. You learn the more general concepts too.

I have spent […] thousands of hours trying to setup various different services on various different platforms

I don’t believe you. If you spend that much time on something you get good at it.

Facebook, mostly. For China it’s WeChat.

We can only imagine how the internet was to the natives before the eternal September.

It’s a good thing nothing critical depends on this, then!

Conversations from F-Droid is pretty solid.

Prosody and Openfire are servers while end-to-end encryption happens on the client side (that’s why it’s called end-to-end). It would be kind of strange if a server implementation talks about E2EE. The OMEMO protocol only needs server features which are widely implemented. Maybe there is an ancient XMPP server implementation out there that doesn’t support it, but you will be fine with Prosody, Snikket, ejabberd or anything else really.

Tor onion services also don’t need any port forwarding to work. They are however only accessible over the Tor network.