you don’t really need to scale a homelab that much

Maybe. But you never know this beforehand.

if something breaks, you just want to quickly fix it manually because “doing the Ansible” is more of a pain

In most cases you just need to replay a playbook for quick fix. But I agree that the proper fix will likely take a longer time (while downtime is much shorter).

now idempotency and documentation-as-code is out of the window.

Let @BruisedMoose@piefed.social decide.

P. S. I don’t like Ansible, other tools can be easier to use. But I don’t want to recommend something concrete.

It is hard, if even possible, to keep documentation up-to-date. Better use a configuration management system (salt, ansible etc.) for your servers. Yes, you need to learn how to use it. Yes, it will take a longer time to make changes in your configuration. But as a result you’ll have a self-documented configuration-as-a-code that will allow you to scale your setup as you need. Reproducing something won’t require reading your notes, remembering your actions etc.

In matrix, chats with e2e encryption are protected from hoster even if they would try to steal your data.