"maintain a home server" in this case roughly means "park a headless Mac mini (or laptop or RPi) on your desk"
And you can use a local LLM if you want to eliminate the cloud dependency.
And you can use a local LLM if you want to eliminate the cloud dependency.
That ship has sailed a long time ago. It's of course possible, if you are willing to invest a few thousand dollars extra for the graphics card rig + pay for power.