I use a Firefox container tied to a socks proxy on my router to bypass VPN for tricky sites. Yeah I know not the answer you’re looking for but some things have to be done (banking, health insurance) and if they already know my home address there’s little reason to hide the IP address
Miniflux is possibly the most important thing I self host. It tells me when software updates (basically everything on GitHub has RSS). It’s also great to keep up with blogs that don’t update consistently and also stay out of the “there are only three websites” bubble.