My fellow self-hosting noob, I gotchu!

Here are three solutions that are easy as pie:

1. Keep using Syncthing, but add additional devices to that folder to ensure one is always online and ready to receive and sync.
   • Pro: You can use an old laptop, a PC at home, your parent's phone and so on. It's like your own torrent network, as long as one peer is online it will always be synced.
   • Con: Your notes will be on those devices too. But in my personal experience Joplin notes don't take much space and as for privacy, you can always E2EE them.

2. Use a different sync method that uses an always-on server for guaranteed sync.
   • I used Nextcloud for half a year and it worked flawlessly. I used the free 8GB hosting that tab.digital offers. Maybe give them a try again?
   • Alternatively, for an even faster experience (almost "Joplin server" levels of speed), use the S3 sync method in combination with Storj.io. They give you 25GB of free, decentralized, open-source, E2EE storage. You can DM me you need help setting up the S3 "bridge" with Joplin but it's fairly easy.
   • You could also use OneDrive or Dropbox and encrypt your notes end-to-end first, but let's assume you want to try to move away from closed-source services, not the opposite. Although the thought of making them pay the electricity bills without giving them your data can be quite amusing :P

3. Use Elfhosted.
   • It's a newcomer in the "managed self-hosting" space that specializes in installing and setting-up all kinds of open-source software on a server for you. For some it's not really self-hosting since you don't have root access to the server, but at least it's not "Google Drive" levels of control and we're trying to get away from that. The guys at Elfhosted give you 10$ for free (no payment method required) to use on all of their offerings and as luck would have it, they also offer a Joplin server instance. The Joplin server instance costs 0.05$ a day, meaning that with those initial 10$ you could try it out for 6 months for free. As far as I can tell, at that price it can't be beaten, not even by a VPS. I used it two weeks ago and had no issues. You even get cool features like note sharing, multiple users and note collaboration. Or, always with Elfhosted, you could just use a Syncthing instance that's always-on, although they price that at 0.10$ a day.

P.s. There's a Joplin community on Lemmy too, at !joplinapp@sopuli.xyz. Happy syncing!

Edit: Hell, here's a fourth solution: Just use something like the FOSS app Round Sync and set it up so that it backs up your local Syncthing folder to a cloud of your choice (like those mentioned above) every 24h, or 2h, or even every 15 minutes. That way, once you come home and power on your laptop, your phone will automatically sync all your notes via Syncthing, but in the event that you lose your phone, you will have a "checkpoint" as recent as you want it to be. This way, you don't have to change your current setup and at the same time you're prepared in case something bad does happen. And in my case seeing that "Joplin Notes: Backup Completed" notification every 24h is something beautiful.