I really think the book Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin is very good on this subject, they have a sort of metaphorical religion created themselves, with many of the good community building aspects on religion.

I personally think there is much good to learn from the ways of Buddhism and Daoism, both their core ideas and some of the practice.

I use both Seafile and Syncthing for various things.

I've managed to setup seafile ok behind traefik as a reverse proxy. Seafile has a basic web front end and allows you to integrate with Collabora for editing open document files. Its fine to just shut down the docker and copy the database I've found for backup. Or you can copy the files themselves, if you don't care about the change history (which I don't). I have as script to do this each night. Seafood isn't too hefty and runs well on an RPi, even the collabora integration does.

Syncthing is a really good piece of software and I use this to share files from my RPi to my phone, but bare in mind by default its send&receive both sides so its not suitable for backups in that state.

Let me know if you want to know more.

The article says that stat about one instance not the entire fediverse...

I also think that bolo'bolo should be more widely read. It's really well written and really thinks through how an alternative society could work, it often feels like an Ursula Le Guin book to me. It's critique of both capitalism and state communism as the Work Machine is pretty great.

I think its spot on about the size of community that's best for humans (a few hundred), and I like that each bolo is based around some guiding principles, I often think that's important for a community to stick together.

It's obviously not perfect or an exact blueprint but its great food for thought and I wish other plans for alternate societies were worked out in engaging detail like bolo'bolo