(Thanks for the photos, yum! The red thingy also looks cute on them 😇)
In Greece the ones in your photos we call them crepes ("κρέπα"); for pancakes I don't think we have a word, e.g. brunch places list them simply as "pancakes", with the english writing
I don't have any specific feeds, and of course it depends on your interests, but I just wanted to recommend to keep an eye out for feeds during your everyday browsing
When I see an interesting link on Lemmy to a news article or a blog, I just look at a couple of more articles on that site, and if it seems interesting I subscribe to it! 😅😉 (I can always unsubscribe later if it turns out that I don't like it). I started using RSS a few days ago, and I've collected quite a few blogs and news sites this way
(Btw also keep in mind, that some news sites provide feeds for specific tags, you don't have to subscribe to everything that gets posted)
Lemmy's license is AGPL, so you would need to at least publish changes to Lemmy itself 😉
(I don't know if e.g. the code for the algorithm is separate, in order to have a closed source algorithm with an open source Lemmy fork)
Ohh nice, I hadn't seen that, thanks!
(I can't help you with Iced, but it's better if you just ask your questions directly: https://nohello.net/ )
You could try something like YunoHost to get started! It's kind of a one-click deployment platform for self-hosting, ready to use with user management, reverse proxy with SSL, somewhat preconfigured services to choose from, etc.
Ideally you can also learn the tools needed like Docker, Ansible, etc, but with yunohost and a SBC (e.g. RaspberryPi), or a €5/month VPS (easier if you want to access your services publicly), you will have a ready-to-use boilerplate that you can start building on.
Learning all the individual technologies at the same time might be overwhelming at the beginning, but something like yunohost will allow you over time to learn all the stuff around the deployment itself, e.g. how domains and DNS records work, how the SSL certificates are generated, which services you would like to set up and use, the configuration needed for these services individually, etc. And at the same time you can start using a few useful services!
Then, as you start learning, you could start setting up services one-by-one manually with e.g. Docker, either at the same server or a new one.
Don't forget to look for the admin documentation for each software you're setting up (e.g. Nextcloud etc). And look at awesome-selfhosted, it's a list of more resources and software to use and deploy!
Good luck and have fun!
(Edit: There are some yunohost alternatives you might want to look into, but most of what I found either had a very small selection of software, or had a subscription service etc that they want to sell you, while limiting what you can do on your own server)
https://poolp.org/posts/2019-08-30/you-should-not-run-your-mail-server-because-mail-is-hard/
It's not super easy, but it isn't impossible either, especially nowadays with email deployment suites
(I'm talking about the email part, hosting at home would also bring other issues e.g. availability, you would need a VPN to route it from a non-residential IP, etc)
Signal has good encryption etc, is centralized, afaik needs Google Play Services except if you use Molly; but I think it's a bit more mainstream and simple to use for end-users
SimpleX also seems to have good encryption, post-quantum etc, and is anonymous and doesn't even use user identifiers (they explain why that's good on their website), so it could be good for occasional more sensitive conversations or sth (but I see people struggling with onboarding when installing it, and I still get confused by the UX sometimes). It's kind of not even decentralized, more like peer-to-peer, with servers to just cache messages when you're offline, I think.
Personally for day-to-day I prefer to use Matrix with Element: decentralized (which I really value for competition and user choice), e2e, and has good support for creating communities etc, so I'm lucky to have it as our main chat platform for work, and I've been using it for years in our hackerspace and personal chats etc. I see end-users still struggling sometimes with onboarding, but if they're close friends/family I usually need to set it up for them anyway
Ohh right, "τηγανίτες"! Thank youu, I haven't heard it in a while 😅