My fear is, that if i don’t document well or not use ansible, I will be hating my life once my server dies and I have to restore my data and also set um my services again in a few years.

I’ve been there plenty of times, you’re not alone. There are two solutions to that problem, really, and it boils down to the classic pet vs cattle.

1. Everything is a pet

Pets mean you care about every server. If it breaks, it’s cheaper for you to fix it than redeploy. The overwhelming majority of your setup will be pets. Why? It’s simpler. Things don’t break that often, and when they do, it’s okay to be low-effort in fixing them.

Write docs for yourself, even if it’s just notes on the sequences of commands to run to redeploy things. You will thank yourself when the server finally dies in two years and you have notes on how to bring everything back.

2. Everything is a cattle

Cattle means there’s no difference between server A and B. Everything is replaceable. Ultimately, whatever you run can run to the same extent in AWS, your basement NAS, or on your desk PC.

Cattle is also a lot of work. You will learn an excruciating amount of things about storage, networking, visualisation, workload scheduling, and such. And it’s easy to be demotivated because of how much there is to learn.

So take it easy. Concur that your hobby world is full of pets, but learn how to do the cattle approach at your leisure. You’ll realise that in every practical cattle setup, there are still pets, and that automating yourself from complexity only means you add layers of somewhere else.

I don’t think that’s plausible.

I’m in a same boat, honestly.

Matrix has decent clients but managing a matrix instance is a world of pain, especially if you federate. And its resource use is really bad then: a single user instance can easily demand 4gb ram if you are in a couple popular chatrooms. Key propagation is oftentimes broken. Clients all have mixed support of features.

Xmpp is a joy to host, but there are no decent clients for iOS.

IRC is easy to host, but the IRCv3 coverage for clients is also meh.

I was looking for something that I could throw at casual people with relative ease and there’s just not a thing. Even the “techy” chat is in discord nowadays.