The ISP would only see “encrypted video call”-like traffic between you and the people who connect to Tor through your snowflake.

How/why would a VPN be useful for this ?

This lets people use your computer as an entry point into the Tor network and camouflage the traffic as a video call between you and them (if the regular, publicly known, entry nodes are blocked by their ISP or gouvernement). The snowflake extension will then forward people’s traffic through the Tor network, and services they use will only see a tor exit node’s IP, not yours. As long as you trust Tor to be secure and anonymous (I personally have very high trust in its guarantees), you don’t have to worry about legal consequences or being blocked by services.

I used to run a few (public) tor relays (entry or middle nodes, not exit ones), including one from my home network and IP. Never had any issue except for one service which blocked everything that had anything to do with Tor. I reached out for their admin, who claimed Tor users can show up with any node’s IP (which they definetly can’t, only exit nodes will forward traffic to the regular internet)

I don’t know about other homeserver implementations but synapse kinda sucks. It used to randomly eat 100% of 1 or 2 CPU cores (including the database) until I tracked it down to 3 rooms having a messed up state which caused costly SQL queries. I removed the rooms from my server (using a third party admin panel because there’s no proper admin GUI built in, the documentation just mentions curl commands to hit the admin API, with placeholders to manually replace). It has been fine since I did it, but I’m the only user on my server. And I expect other issues to come up at any time…

It also eats a lot of storage, mostly the database. It grew very large quickly, but it’s more stable now

What I mean by “lower level” is that it has less abstractions built in

Systemd abstracts so much stuff away that it does not feel like learning Linux “from scratch” :/

(I like having it in my daily driver, but it’s sad LFS had to drop support for a “lower level” init system)

MAC addresses are only visible on a LAN

I once had a similar issue, caused by the keyboard layout in the os installer (when I defined the password) being different from the keyboard layout used for unlocking the drive. I quickly leaned to type my password in qwerty on my azerty keyboard and all is fine now.

Another similar thing I’m thinking about is trying with caps lock, as you may have had it on when defining the password