I meant it in the sense that you should get into the habit of avoiding any unencrypted connections, especially if they’re routed through the open internet but it’s also good practice to do it on your LAN. It’s not essential on the LAN as it is on the internet but if you start doing it regularly it will be harder to mess up.

And it’s also a good idea to get a domain and some Let’s Encrypt certificates and set up a *.local.your.domain area for all your services, and learn about how DNS works, maybe start thinking about taking your email private and not depend on one of the big providers and so on and so forth. Lots of potential benefits for a self-hoster and for privacy.