Either DMZ on the first router, or bridge mode on the second.

Your opinion is a hard-learned lesson here. I only recently figured that out. The Nextcloud “app store” is just too tempting.

I use both as well. They server different purposes. When my wife wants to take a quick scan of a paper document and archive it instantly, or have pictures auto-upload, or open and edit a document we worked on a year ago, all on her IPhone, the Nextcloud client works great and really has no competition in the iOS world. When I want to keep the files in my home directory, including some big, regularly changing files, instantly synced between computers and hosted VMs, Syncthing is amazing. I also add Syncthing shares as an external source in Nextcloud, so I can open those files via the web. As others have said, Nextcloud works fine, provided you don’t start installing all sorts of “apps” you don’t need -stick to the basics.

The author of archive box makes a very strong case for the need for both decentralized and centralized archives like the internet archive: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-changelog-software-development-open-source/id341623264?i=1000678444105

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, until there is any actual examples of Canada banning images. Even in this case, it’s a loss of public funding rather than blocking. The internet archive is mostly privately funded.

Yes, the trouble with archiving is knowing what will be important in the future, rather than just popular now. We saved a lot of games from the 80’s through 2000’s through piracy, because they were popular to pass around, but we lost a most of the early web because no one thought it would disappear until the internet archive came along.

Wow, what a dumb thing to claim when you have surrounded yourself with “free speech absolutists”. They are going to lose it on him, right? …. Right?

I see you have a bunch of good answers now, so I’ll ask; if you are comfortable self hosting, why not consider a VPS? Yes it can be a little bit of maintenance, but it’s very minimal and you get far more flexibility and the ability to further develop those selfhosting chops.

I use sendgrid as my outgoing smtp relay to avoid ip reputation issues you mention. You still have to configure your dns settings for spf and dkim pointing at their servers instead of yours. Their free tier is 10x the email I’ll ever send so it doesn’t cost anything. There are a few companies in this space with free tiers. It works, but it isnt Gmail level deliverability. I still get spam binned occasionally.

This is signal detection theory combined with an arms race that keeps the problem hard. You cannot block scrapers without blocking people, and you cannot inconvenience bots without also inconveniencing readers. You might figure something clever out temporarily, but eventually this truism will resurface. Excuse me while I solve a few more captchas.