Sounds like you want something like Syncthing instead. There are ios clients for it as well, Mobius gets recommended frequently.

Two people communicating one-to-one and starting a new account to solely dedicate to maintaining a pretty public open source project doesn’t sound too fishy, tbh, if everything else checks out. (Catfriend1 confirms the handover, etc.)

Instead of a bare metal hypervisor, you can install Kubernetes on it, k3s works on a single node. Lots of use across the industry.