I also use Posteo, one thing to note though is that Posteo doesn't (and probably won't any time soon) support custom domains. If that doesn't bother you, it's a great choice.
The other alternative I found during my research, which doesn't have that limitation, is mailbox.org.
You can absolutely re-encode h265 video, but you can't do it losslessly. In the end, it's always a balance between quality and filesize.
I decided for myself, that 1080p30 crf28 h265 is good enough for home video, which lead to a 50% to 80% storage space reduction on videos from my phone.
If you don't obsess over quality, I would highly recommend just messing around with ffmpeg a little bit and decide how much quality you're willing to lose in order to save disk space. When you're happy with your settings, you can either use ffmpeg itself or some fancy batch program like Tdarr to transcode all (or parts of) your video library.
My goto command is:
for file in *.mp4; do ffmpeg -i "$file" -movflags use_metadata_tags -map_metadata 0 -vcodec libx265 -crf 28 -vf scale=1920:-1 -r 30 "${file%.*}_transcoded.mp4"; done
Magic Earth (while not FOSS, it's privacy oriented though) can do this.
There's also Transportr, but AFAIK it's been unmaintained for quite a while now, so it may not work / stop working soon.
My personal gripe with mobile Firefox is searching by using the address bar.
I have had countless times where I put in my search prompt, followed by pressing the little X all the way on the right and thus clearing the address bar. My brain just really expects an enter button to be there.
I think my current record is entering a search term and then clearing it literally directly 3 times in a row, getting more and more confused each time.
Adding to what others here have already said, I'd definitely download Signal and see if you can get any people to move from WhatsApp/Telegram/whatever to Signal.
I don't know much about iOS apps, but you could look into more privacy focused YouTube clients, and possibly 2FA clients too (although that's a bit of a controversial topic on iOS AFAIK).
I saw you mention in another comment that you use Amazon Alexa for smart home appliances. Depending on interest in selfhosting / time / motivation to move away from Amazon, you could look into using Home Assistant instead. It even has a Lemmy community: [email protected].
Yep my mistake, I confused ShadowSocks with Cloak.
No clue how that guy is zooming with one finger, but zooming while recording a video on my Pixel 6 works just fine when pinching with 2 fingers.
I've never used a Pro Pixel (so can't comment on telephoto), but I never noticed it if there is one. From just clicking around between ultrawide and 1x on my Pixel 6, it seems fine and if I had to guess I'd say it roughly takes 0.5s to switch.
Indeed, they all use UFS 3.1 (so does the 128 GB Galaxy S23 though). I have never looked at storage type and my Pixel 6 doesn't feel slow in any way.
I have no idea what you mean with the camera, it is one of the best Android cameras out there. This is also true when running Graphene OS, as long as you download the 'Pixel Camera' app from either the Google Play store or APK sites (must download as an APK bundle then!).
AFAIK you nailed the differences between NewPipe and NewPipeX.
As for FairEmail, I've used it for well over a year without paying and it's been great (I plan on buying the pro version soon). It has kind of a pay what you want model, technically you can unlock all features for literally 10 cents.
I'm not that knowledgeable on security for hosting services with external access either, I'm sure there are some great YouTube videos out there.
A Raspberry Pi should be perfectly fine for hosting something like Seafile or Nextcloud though (Nextcloud might be a pain in the butt to host).
DP altmode means being able to output HDMI over your phone's USB-C port, the Pixels are famous for missing that feature. But I believe from Pixel 8 onwards it was added again, if this is important for you you should do your own research on it though.
I'm afraid your best bet here will be using WhatsApp.
Edit:
FindMy (for Android) might also be usable for that, but honestly if you just want it to work I'd still vouch for WhatsApp.
I really like Pop!_OS, AFAIK it doesn't have any telemetry. It's basically a Ubuntu fork but without the stupid Ubuntu stuff, and they're currently even working on their own Desktop Environment.