I see a lot of recommendations for self hosted alternatives, either at home or a VPS/Rented server. While the HN crowd is probably better suited than most people, running a server connected to the internet is no small taks, and people should seriously consider other alternatives before doing so.
For some of the services, your own privacy measures may not matter one bit. Take email for example, you may self host it, or use a privacy oriented provider, but it doesn't help one bit if you recipient is on gmail or outlook, so one could argue that attempting to privacy secure email is in vain. You can of course use GPG, but that requires the receiver to publish keys, which not very many people do.
I've self hosted for a couple of decades, but some years ago i decided i no longer wanted to be our resident sysadm, and instead moved everything to the cloud. I went from a proxmox cluster and a couple of NAS boxes spinning at home, to nothing spinning, and no open ports in the firewall.
We now use regular cloud services (Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, etc), and instead use Cryptomator (https://cryptomator.org/) to encrypt everything before sending it to the cloud.
For specific apps we use
- Joplin for notes (or just ios notes)
- Signal for messaging (though in reality we use quite a few clients, as it highly depends on what your recipient uses)
- MXRoute for mail / contacts
- DuckDuckGo for searching.
- Cryptomator on top of whatever cloud storage the individual prefers.
- Photos, here we chose the easy path, and simply use the integration offered by our phones, which in our case means iPhones, so iCloud.