Underrated explanation, you held it finally click for me. I consider myself a fairly educated person but just couldn't wrap my head around what made it so special. Correct me if i'm wrong but my understanding is the server uses the public key to encrypt a challenge code that can only be decrypted by your private key. You get an on device prompt to approve the process and the rest is done under the hood.
To go further on this, is the public/private key a mathematical relationship? What ties the two together to make them useful as a pair?
One is a hopeful future the other is a mythical past. I lean towards trek because i want to believe a version of that future is possible.
AudioBookShelf is a beautiful podcast option. OP would have to fully migrate into it but once done it'll let you listen to an episode on pc, pause, then resume from the same spot on mobile. It'll auto grab episode as they come out and store them on your system for streaming or local access. The android app is pretty good and i know webapp works well on ios
That goes hand in hand with a level of trust with some companies/people and everyone has different threat tolerances. It also highlights the mindset that you have no idea what the person on the other end of the message is doing with it. End to end encryption helps keep in line eavesdropping down but if the recipient of the message has a compromised device or are screenshoting everything and posting it on facebook it's out of your control.
As someone else said, selfhosting is the only real way to overcome this problem. When it's all on your hardware it matters a lot less if the messaged at are decrypted server side or not. Everyone has a different threat level and at some point you have to put trust in some companies but if beeper makes you uncomfortable then buy a cheap second hand mini pc and learn to self host the service.
I'm never a fan of virtualizing network related items for the sake of redundancy, if your server goes down the rest of your network can keep doing it's thing. That being said, with the hardware you have on your hands i don't see any solid atonemen argument for bringing in more hardware.
Proxmox is a great base for you to really ramp things up and i'd recommend looking into pfsense as a routing/firewall solution. There's a bunch of great youtube videos that can talk you through setting it up and using it as your vpn point, adblocking, reverse proxy, and so much more.
In the later books they drop a line about anti aging meds a couple times as a way to explain the timeline. I wanted to be mad about that but realized i accepted anti cancer meds without blinking.
I'm no expert but my understanding is all drinking cans are lined with plastic to withstand erosion.
https://www.ehow.com/facts_7390219_metal-cans-lined-plastic-coating_.html
As a self taught self-hosting enthusiast i wouldn't recommend ansible to a beginner. I know that sounds backwards as absible makes everything easy and does all the work for you but that's also part of the problem. It would be like jumping behind the wheel of a self driving car without knowing how to drive at all. When (not if) something goes wrong it could go wrong hard and you'd lose the whole instance.
It's better to start with some other self hosted projects that interest you to get a feel for the process and software like docker then work your way up to bigger things like lemmy. I consider myself fairly versed in the process and lemmy still gave me some issues to set up and my pixelfed instance still won't federate despite my best efforts. I'm pretty sure i know the issue, i just need to get around to fixing it.
Last thought, the raspberry pi is a pretty impressive little pc for it's size and price point but you might find yourself quickly burning through resources depending on the number of active users you have and how heavily you use it.