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.

Gitea
Backups via rsync
Jellyfin
Piped for YouTube

Using gentoo Linux with raspberry pi 4B