are there any updates on the plans for gitea to join the fediverse and go federated, as well?

If you want to trim it down to the bare minimum, you can go for syncthing and filebrowser, I’m thinking about migrating to that setup myself, as I, too, think that Nextcloud is overloaded with features they cannot even polish after the first release and while I like Seafile for what it is, I don’t like to put all my data into the hands of a Chinese organization, because Seafile encrypts your data for version control and detection if a file has been altered. Filebrowser does not have apps for iOS or Android, but the interface seems touch friendly enough for my taste. If you don’t need the sync functionality, you can also go with a VPN in combination with SFTP and use filebrowser for external access.