The problem with you techbros is you can’t imagine anything at smaller scales. But what you just said… Jabber is here for 25 years. That means it is good enough for tons of people. Not everybody needs a shiney new toy and if free software doesn’t scale, then who cares. It can and will still work for those of us willing to share the burden and for those that can’t, each one of me can accommodate at least a few such users and those that just won’t… Fuck em. We don’t have to capture every use case to be of value. I use jabber. I have plans to self host it. It works and has done so for 25 years. Furthermore AIM captured everything a chat needs to do, why do we keep reinventing this wheel when there are much more interesting problems that need to be solved.
Airsonic music server… There are a few quirks getting it all set up properly, but once it works, it just seems to work forever. Samba file sharing server. Also miniDLNA server can make it easy to watch your movie collection on a tv. The airsonic DLNA doesn’t seem to be working currently. I also have a few mastodon bots running from a Pi4. Also could run a tor relay node, which would make it so it’s less idle. I have a lot of stuff on my Pi4 and it is still mostly idle most of the time. Thats fine though. For me it’s not a huge problem, since overall, my goal is to make it use as little power as possible for all those things. I think thats the whole point is to really use the most lightweight computer that can do what you need. If you just need the print server, you could always get a lower power Pi so you can really optimize how much power needs to be used and maybe even do some sort of Wake on LAN setup so it can be sleeping while not in use.