Is there a community specific to FOSS or just general privacy oriented IoT? With plenty of hardware discussion along with software. Routers, piholes, Meshtastic, anything IoT but open source. If it touches a network but you want it to do something it doesn’t. Flashing a doorbell camera with FOSS firmware. Hosting media servers on your phones Hotspot. Loading gcode to a printer from anywhere. There are so many things and possibilities.
If there isn’t someone should start one, OpenIoT or something catchy and relevant.
Home assistant, ESPhome and Tasmota form a core of this. The self hosting community also has a strong mindset towards security.
The stuff I self host is mostly because I don’t trust the “free” services a lot of techies seem fine relying on. I’ve seen too many providers suddenly go belly up, and screw people over.
I also use defence in depth. The “S” in IoT stands for security.