(^ I read this as witty sarcasm :) ) As a FOSS type person exposed to many facets, I must hand it to the people of France for running a lot of independent infrastructure. You’re out there living life and stumble across “yet another” French instance of something (git, email, whatever), probably with a collective behind it. Germany and The Netherlands are close behind as well, tons of collectives running infra all over the place by these fine folks.

See here’s the thing - the mascot and URL are serving their purpose to deter the software author’s outsiders. They don’t want your business, it is a social signal being sent and the reception from your coworker? - did it’s job.

It sounds good but in practice it doesn’t work out; laptops sleep, people put their phones on airplane at night, whatever happens in life. The “best” solutions use some sort of cache-and-forward relay (thinking like DeltaChat relays, or I hear SimpleX is adding them) but I think most end up looking at Snikket (xmpp) or Matrix for the group management etc. on a central server. The Disroot group uses “Movim” which is XMPP highly customized to a social experience.

I use DeltaChat with friends and there’s a lot of things you can’t do because it’s essentially P2P with caching relays - like Jami, all control and data is stored on the device(s). If all you’re looking for is a Signal replacement it’s great (and why we use it), but if you want good group social controls you gotta go the central server route.

I think Jami here could do with caching relays like Delta has, could move this project to the next level.

Put HE (dns.he.net) in your back pocket - they run a free DNS service which includes slave (do we still call it that?) service so that you can add their resolver as an ultimate failover / failback if your self hosted DNS takes a dive for whatever reason things break in our world.

Generally, hosting your own DNS “should” mean having a primary and secondary on separate AS networks, or at least different provider routes or locations. But if you’re doing all this from home, where is the second location for DR purposes… exactly? I sure don’t have one, power goes out here everything goes dark - in the old days everyone used to do this (share out tertiary DNS to each other) but it’s become a thing of the past in today’s world. HE can help fill that gap.

To your point - I use Gcore DNS and Bunny DNS for my stuff, as I mainly use online VPSes and don’t run racks of hardware at the house. The only things I physically selfhost at home are a pair of old laptops acting as storage servers which backup all my bytes and bits from online to some SSDs.

The above said, it wasn’t hard to find a project using XDG and a JSON mapping file (basically your idea fleshed out in python) to get where you want to go if XDG is enough: https://github.com/JonTheNiceGuy/usbrowser

You’re not going to like this answer - there’s a bunch of different ways depending on the app(s) and the desktop environment. The Arch wiki goes over it in detail: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Default_applications

I would guess that focusing on the XDG spec and covering Gnome, KDE and Xfce (Xfce can be replaced with anything else like Cinnamon that comes with Mint, “non Gnome or KDE”) is the best plan of attack for what matters to 80%+ of the population.