There are many instances which have “stuck by” Lemmy for years, such as hexbear or lemmygrad, and none of them ever showed the sort of entitled attitude that beehaw admins have.

Interesting choices. Often it doesnt seem like they would be using the more advanced moderation tools anyway. Its just natural that they dont complain about something missing they dont need.

You probably don’t want to use tailscale and other VPN solutions for this, as your friends and any guests would need to install that too to be able to connect.

Do you have a static IP from your ISP?
If so, then as the other commenter said, you only need to set up a port forward to the mumble server running on your network. This is necessary, because that’s how you allow certain traffic to reach your server on the internal network. If that Matrix sever is public (internet facing), and federation is working correctly, you probably have a static IP.
If you don’t… well, you would be better off with a domain, then. That’s because your IP address will change from time to time, and your friends would always need to correct it. They would get annoyed real quick, I think. But, a domain’s purpose is that the computer can look up the current IP address assigned to it, so that should help in that case.

The point is on the “hourly increase”, which starts at 0.

Yes, I’m also at a loss on what to use.
The last thing I had heard of that caught my attention is Frigate, but as I understood it relies too heavily (for me) on AI based features that require special hardware. Haven’t been able yet to really look into it.

Maybe a firewalled BlueIris running with Wine is still the way to go.
Or, special hardware with it’s original software that is also firewalled off from the internet or any devices at home that shouldn’t have access.

Recently I looked at iSpy because I remembered their featureful program (never really used it so this is really just a perception) and since they are pushing AgentDVR a lot, I’ve looked into it a little. I’m not really sure if AgentDVR is open sorce. I have searched for a link to it’s source code and haven’t found one, but also AlternativeTo marks it as proprietary. I worry they have started massively misleading users, and that you said that they are heavily pushing monetization does not help.

Maybe you could check the original iSpy if it works the way you want, but I think that is windows only.
But to be honest, iSpy (as the organization/company) is very shady to me. As I have said above, the original iSpy program is open source, but just take a look at their Github repo: it’s clean of any releases or tags, so you cannot find the source code for a specific version.