Can’t really disagree. I’ve been running a small Synapse server for personal use for 7 years, I think, still waiting on the ecosystem being actually fully usable.

One problem is the protocol, it evolves too fast for 3rd party (FOSS) clients or server software to keep up. This means that either you run Synapse and Element, or you risk that your server can’t federate with Synapse, which is probably most of Matrix.

Then there’s this Element X ordeal, it’s a marketing disaster. A Matrix client is pretty complicated, and the Element team decided to start writing everything from scratch. Unfortunately I think they got hit with the same problem as 3rd party clients, it’s hard to finish missing client features when you’re struggling to keep up with a rapidly evolving protocol and server. Not sure if the devs still say Element X is even beta, while the marketing people promote it as feature-complete, ready for prime time. This is likely just to raise money, but it sure ain’t helping the confusion with regular people, who to be fair are likely not the target audience for any part of the stack.

All that said, I host Synapse, use Element and Element X, and haven’t had any issues in many years. But I just don’t trust them to work well enough to suggest a non-tech-savvy friend to try. I really wish they’d put the brakes on a bit.

Put the job in a script that only outputs text on error, and use MAILTO, like many have said. Due to spam filters that might not be an option though.

Next option is ntfy or gotify. make sure the script exits with nonzero status on error, and append || curl -XPOST -d 'cronjob failed' 'https://ntfy.sh/your-random-topic' to the crontab line. Naturally you’ll likely want the ntfy/gotify mobile app to receive the notodication. On iOS this might suck, as at least for me the ntfy app didn’t update in the background at all.

Next one is an push uptime monitor, self-hosted or managed. I like Uptime Kuma. Make sure the script only exits with 0 status on success, and append && curl 'https://your-monitor-endpoint/identifier to the crontab line. Or use an inverted monitor and use || instead of &&.

The uptime monitor will then notify you if the script hasn’t succeeded in the defined interval.

With some combination of these you can be pretty confident you’ll notice a failure, but still better to check every once in a while.

I also have a lot of jobs around that notify for each run, despite success or error, but it’s a bit too easy to just glance the message and accidentally ignore an error.

Imagepipe:
https://f-droid.org/packages/de.kaffeemitkoffein.imagepipe/

Fossify Calendar is my favourite calendar app:
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.fossify.calendar/

Breezy Weather:
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.breezyweather/
though I’m using the Github build

There are many others.

You can export and import calendars and contacts as .ics and .vcf files from/to Nextcloud.

The mobile apps even have a setting to do this automatically on a schedule, they’re saved to your files in Nextcloud. It’s a bit strange it’s not a server-side feature, but it’s there anyway.

Many Nextcloud apps only store their data to the database, if you end up using those, you’ll be reliant on Hetzner’s backups with Storage Share, and you can’t get those for yourself. I don’t think you can get a db dump from Hetzner even via customer support.

A VPS will start to get expensive if you have more data, but you can just lift-and-shift that to a home server later.

I really don’t understand this “Nextcloud does too much” rhetoric, the standard bare metal installation is basically just Files, Photos, Calendar and Contacts. Also a built-in text/markdown editor. Everything else is an add-on, which needs to be installed separately.

Pro tip: use symlinks instead of copying files, the backup is near instant!