I showed my 7 year old. She was very amused and still does not believe there are any dolphins.

That's what xmpp is. It was embraced by Google and Facebook and killed.

I have a home server and a laptop. Both run different versions of Ubuntu

Mine is large enough to be a capybara.

Best is so subjective.

I am running pivpn, pihole, all the arrs, jellyfin, gitea and rundeck.

Email has the same problems as federated lemmy servers.

Mail Servers can end up on distrubuted blacklists and unable to communicate with each other. When office 365 has an outage it causes huge problems because it's a single large provider having issues. That provider goes down but not email as a whole.

This is the same as what happened about a week ago when lemmy.ml and lemmy.world went down due to load.