Admin of globe.pub, a community for travelers. Also online at mplewis.com.
Tailscale is a nice way to set up a private network between your machines. It’s perfectly fine.
If I still need to run a bouncer to get history scrollback, then no, I will not consider IRC.
You can also configure pict-rs to run on object storage so that all your users’ images are stored on S3 rather than your local disk.
I use Porkbun with Gmail and ForwardEmail.net. They do a great job.
Networking two machines is easy; networking several with good onboarding and DNS is not as easy.