I would very much like to move from Google and Microsoft and other proprietary, non privacy services.
I have spent hundreds of $ and thousands of hours trying to setup various different services on various different platforms and every single one of them has been difficult, annoying, frustrating, and ultimately fails.
I have concluded I am just not the guy to do this as I am Windows CAD guy and have no idea what I am doing with networking, Linux or CLI. 90% of the words and terms in tutorials are greek to me.
I am looking for notes (Joplin), Google Drive replacement (NextCloud?), and email (??) on a cloud server. And then video streaming (plex or jellyfin + *arr?) and photo management (immich?) on my local machines.
Let me know if you are interested or know of somewhere better to post this.
Paying for a Nextcloud provider would likely solve most of your issues. You can run a lot of services within nextcloud itself using addons.
For video streaming I use kodi+seren+real-debrid. This doesn’t provide local copies, but I don’t really need any. It’s not hard to set up.
edit: https://github.com/nextcloud/providers#providers