Agreed. You watch one video and the entire homepage changes.

Centralization is a weakness. These services can be targeted by governments that want to limit communication. Free speech is a commodity, and servers host this free speech. If a hostile organization, such as a government, targets a channel of free speech such as those hosted on a platform that makes it easy to setup a mastodon instance, this become an easy target that will affect a large portion of users. If you are serious about freedom, you have the freedom to self-host your own platforms.

Edit: I realize my post doesn’t answer the question proposed, but it’s more of an argument against such services. I would argue self-hosting doesn’t rely on paying third-parties to host your software, but I guess this is in the eye of the hoster.

I’d just skip OpenVPN altogether and get started with Wireguard or Headscale/Tailscale.

This one was huge for me. OpenVPN is pretty heavy with CPU overhead, where as wireguard is almost free. I was getting throttled due to the overhead of OpenVPN and roasting the CPU on my Netgear R6350 (it’s what I had lying around). With wireguard I get nearly the same speeds as without a VPN and my loads are very reasonable.

Also with weaker routers like mine, be wary of trying to use QoS, this will probably not help network congestion and instead become a bottleneck (like it did for me). This is where a beefy dedicated router really shines.