Signal actually has a rule on not using third party clients on its servers. These clients existing do not prove the point you intend.

Doesn’t take away the fact that not being on F-droid is a huge issue and says a lot about how much they care about privacy and security.

Is it time stamp of last usage, or time stamp of all messages?

I don’t think there’s any significant downsides. I suppose you are dependent on their infrastructure and uptime. If they ever go down, or for any reason stop offering their services, then you’re out of luck. But yeah that’s not significant.

The reason I want to do this is it gives me more control over the setup in case I ever wanted to customize it or the wireguard config, and also teaches me more in general, which will enable me to better debug.

I use gentoo, so my swap is pretty large because it often compiles from source. I have it at 16 GB for my raspberry pi and 32 GB for my pc. I think I’ll be bumping up the raspberry pi to 32

I always redo it lol, which is kind of a waste but I enjoy it.

Maybe a related question is what I wish I could do if I had the time (which I will do eventually. Some I plan to do very soon):

• self host wireguard instead of using tailscale
• self host a ACME-like setup for self signed certificates for TLS and HTTPS
• self host encrypted git server for private stuff
• setup a file watcher on clients to sync my notes on-save automatically using rsync (yes I know I can use syncthing. Don’t wanna!)