Side note, the restaurant analogy is exactly why I hate the seemingly American style of service where the waiter asks how the food is halfway through.

I guess that’s a good analogy for how creepy surveillance capitalism is, it’s like a waiter judging and recording your every move and reaction throughout the entire meal.

Immich users flag Google sites as dangerous

Not sure of your specific needs, but I feel that self hosting (i.e. setting up a proper server) is unnecessary. Just pick a local first program and use it with syncthing.

The usual trio (which may be overkill) are Obsidian (admittedly not open source), Trillium, and logseq.