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...

They are so off the mark its crazy, the future of this is streaming games services. Yea it'll be running on windows or linux at the other end and that isn't what Apple wants but its the future.