Maybe peertube?

Yeah, xmpp is a great protocol, but everyone needs to be in the vicinity of the server. A mesh network (p2p) where every client also relays messages for other clients is better suited for this usecase. I think meshtastic is an open standard for this. Briar is a valid alternative that works with phones, which most people already own. Not the greatest idea to bring those to protests, though because of network surveillance attacks by police forces. A meshtastic device would solve this problem.

I wish Snikket could work on Yunohost! 😢 I have a core i5-10500T and 32G

Well yunohost seems to support prosody, that should work very well. Snikket is basically just prosody with some extensions preinstalled. If you want an xmpp server on yunohost you could just install prosody or alternatively run snikket in a docker container. Prosody might even be easier to setup if you can install it via the yunohost gui.

I still love getting messages via xmpp from friends and family using my own snikket/ejabberd instances after years of use. Calls as well.

Video conferences via jitsi meet fill my heart with joy since the covid epidemic. These are also xmpp based. It’s just a cool lightweight protocol.

Simplewall works great, it’s open source. And yes, there are a couple of million requests made by windows apps alone, which are completely fine to block. Simplewall also blocks windows telemetry. I have to use win11 at work and it’s an absolute ahitstorm of network requests that you don’t get to see when using windows firewall.

Glaswire looks beautiful and functions well, but you will hit the paywall after a couple of weeks (I used this on the around 2010 I think)

…It won"t be turned on by default, yet.

xmpp and syncthing

No, push always leaks metadata to Google. Use molly (signal fork on fdroid) and unified push instead.

Rockbox runs on apple ipods. Best thing to do is always buying a device compatible with open source software if you plan to use it fir years on end.

I bought one of those used for my daughter a couple of years ago. It was quite the hassle to replace the apple firmware win with rockbox, but it’s been working well since then. It’s copy and paste mp3s now instead of using apples spying bloatware just to get a few files onto the device. The battery is not great but still lasts a couple of hours after 15(?) years.