All my notes for tabletop RPG stuff, mainly! I run a few Pathfinder campaigns.

Trillium is my personal choice for self-hosted notes. I haven’t really had issues with using it on mobile, but I also just tend to put the stuff I think of when I’m out and about into a single note that I periodically go through and reorganize. It’s been good to me so far, and it has all of the features I really need. If I need something fancier (or public-facing), I toss it in BookStack instead. Then again, I don’t use either of them for business (mostly for tabletop RPG stuff and instructions to friends/family about using the other stuff I self-host), so if that’s your application, I have no clue how it holds up.

You can use nginx or traefik as a reverse proxy locally without opening ports 80 and 443 to the world and host your own local DNS service that points to your server’s IP (and even use a self signed certificate to get HTTPS working).

It’s the cost of federation with instances that try to be giant general-purpose instances (.world and .ee, mostly): just constant shitty takes that overwhelm participants in the conversation. Federation works far better with lots of small purpose-driven instances instead of gigantic ones; my small (<1000 users) specific community-focused Mastodon instance sees absolutely nothing like this and is full of people who intentionally engage in good-faith conversation with the rest of the community while every large instance I’ve seen has the same issues as centralized social media in that regard.

Is there another alternative? Bandcamp is the only similar website that a lot of artists I enjoy use.

It’s pretty similar to most other roleplay in an RPG in my experience: you remember that you’re all playing characters and you respect out-of-character boundaries (including fade to black for anything too explicit or indulgent). I’ve been worried about crossing boundaries before but I don’t think I’ve ever actually crossed a line over the course of quite a few campaigns, even with the couple of times I’ve had to fade to black. You just have to know your players and be explicit about boundaries; I’ve had players request that no romance be present in a game before and I’ve accommodated that as well as players who’ve explicitly stated that they want to play flirtatious characters (though not in the same game, obviously).

And of course just be cognizant of how much detail you’re going into; you don’t want to be describing the details of a makeout scene, but “Jessica presses in for a long kiss” does the job and doesn’t violate most people’s boundaries in my experiences as long as they’re okay with the general themes.

Never really had it go “weird”, and honestly, though I’ve ended up in an IRL relationship with a player in one of my games on two separate occasions, the in-game romance doesn’t seem to be related (neither of the people I ended up dating stood out in that regard).