Debian stable on servers. Debian testing on the daily driver.
Gives you a rock solid server, that will pull absolutly no suprises.
And your daily driver gives you a playground for what comes in the next upgrade.

For a foss project irc logs of channels are important makes irc into google able knowledge. For privacy, use matrix and encryption.

For matrix there is a no for client removes image metadata. Did you check all clients? I would imagine it was client dependent.