I have signal-cli set up on my home assistant and use that for notifications from home.assistant as well as uptime kuma, etc.

Don’t use youtube if you care about your privacy.

I bought a dutch sim card (no registration) and a used android phone thats not linked to me to activate it. Then I made an whatsapp account with that number and I am only accessing it via whatsapp web on my graphene OS phone on a special profile with no acceas to my contacts. That profile also uses a dutch mullvad vpn server thats always on.

I am not dutch and don’t live in the Netherlands.

/dev/null

I’d go ahead and contact Dwight Schrute, he seems to be the expert on beets.

CMR!

Do not buy SMR drives!

I do live at 3 locations in 2 countries for work reasons and have a wireguard VPN server at my primary home that acts as a gateway for all my traffic, not only because of streaming but also because my bank locked me out for suspicious behavior before. The routers at locations 2 and 3 are sending all their traffic to my primary home.

No issues with this setup, I can only recommend it. I also have a centralized NAS this way and all my home assistant instances are interconnected.