Probably nothing has really changed. And I am not claiming it to be a Discord killer, as it really only does the voice rooms well.
But I am recommending it if you and your friends just need a voice room or two (as me and my friends do).
I have tried XMPP, Matrix and now I’ve settled on Mumble.
Me and my fellows mostly just need a voice room or a couple to sit in, and Mumble does that best out of these three, in my opinion.
I recommend giving Mumble a try as it is super easy to set up and use. Users don’t need to even create accounts to join servers.
With 3 drives I would go with BTRFS RAID1. You get half the capacity, can lose any one of the drives, and it is really simple.
If you were to add drives later on to increase the array size, I might consider RAID10, but if you plan on sticking with 3 drives, I would go with RAID1 instead.
RAID0 offers no redundancy, so I would skip it.
RAID5/6 are not recommended for use in production.
I found ejabberd to be more easy to configure than prosody. I just recently tried both, and couldn’t get prosody to work with my certs.
I can give you my podman run files if you’d like!
It is very much possible to have a dynamic IP and a usable domain.
Both Cloudflare and desec.io (for example) have APIs that you can hit everytime your public IP changes.
I have a script that checks every minute whether my public IP has changed from the last check, and if it has, an API call will be sent.
With a scheme like this, your downtime will be minimal, if ever even noticed.