If your purpose is long term archival you should probably be using M-Disc Blu-rays anyway, which are still actively made by Verbatim (and one other company).
sandwichsaregood
Not entirely sure about the de-google'd version of the Home Assistant companion app, but I know the regular companion app uses Firebase (and whatever the Apple equivalent is called, I forget) to deliver notifications, and it still would using Telegram as Telegram also uses Firebase. Apprise is a bit different as it can use multiple backends. Regardless, there are multiple ways to do things. Ntfy iphone and google app do not route your data through a third party server. I self host the ntfy server on my own machine and domain and my phone connects to it and receives data. It will deliver notifications wherever I am, not just in my LAN. It also provides a nice UI akin to Pushbullet I can use to send myself stuff privately.
You can't replicate all of what ntfy does with Home Assistant. There's more to it than just delivering notifications, it's the whole app frontend and persistent data etc. If it's not clear to you what it's for from my description you might have to go look into it yourself. Look at PushBullet, that's most similar to what I primarily use it for.
Home Assistant notifications and almost all other notification services on phones actually route notifications through a cloud service like Firebase because Apple and Google try to railroad apps into their platforms. Ntfy lets you actually self host notifications without a third party, but also without killing your battery.
That's not the main thing I care about, though. Mainly I use it as a self hosted replacement for PushBullet, to share links and files with myself across machines and do some light alerting for servers and stuff (e.g. TrueNAS errors). Some of that could he done with HA, but ntfy is just better for some other uses with stuff like its web ui.
Plus, apart from that ntfy is really easy to integrate with other stuff, like its easy to send a notification from a shell script or web hook so you can hack it into things that don't otherwise support notifications (there are also lots of things that support ntfy natively, e.g. the arrs).
Actually Budget for finances, Nextcloud for everything office and organization, Home Assistant for home automation, paperless--ngx for storing and sorting documents, freshrss for news, ntfy.sh for notifications.
Assuming you mean Android, FYI syncthing for android is discontinued, so you might want to look into other options.
https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android?tab=readme-ov-file#discontinued
I don't think immich supports this natively but you could mount an S3 store with s3fs-fuse and put the library on there without much trouble. Or many other options like webdav.
I really like Zoraxy. Similar to NPM but it's its own thing and I like it a lot more
I know how to use raw nginx/Caddy/traefik to do it, but I find the WebUI and all the extra features Zoraxy has to be very convenient and easy to use.
Impossible to say, could be the app is doing something funky, could be iOS, could be lotta things.
I will note, my preferred solution is to do none of the above, and I only do split DNS for one particular service. I much prefer just using an always on Wireguard VPN that is set to only route traffic to my internal subnets and to use my internal DNS server. Then I just use internal names. Wireguard basically runs at line rate on my setup, so half the time I don't even turn it off at home. This also gives you the option to use DNS ad blocking (eg adguard) on the go.
Hmm, caching has never caused problems with split DNS for me, but it's really hard to debug what was going on with your setup. Split DNS is really common and is the preferred way to solve this, so most browsers have logic to handle it. You might have had something misconfigured, but unfortunately it's really hard to diagnose.
AKA, split DNS. Doing it this way is a bit cleaner than hairpin NAT as mentioned in other comments, but both options work fine in a home network.
Previous 3 major release upgrades I've done were smooth, ymmv