minimal-web-notepad VS bbs

That is correct, but there is also this fork that allows you to password protect notes as well as some other features.

https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/63

People should be aware that privacy tools can make you stand out. Unless methods are used to obfuscate your data.

I never trusted Signal due to https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/60

VPNs are totally detectable - its your traffic eg what ur searching up that is hard or impossible to decrypt. to make the VPN TRAFFIC itself undetectable, you have to obfuscate it. Now there could be a lot of reasons as to how your school blocked your vpn. The ports expressvpn use may have been blocked, for example. I personally don't use express vpn but use my own, but protocols like wireguard which MAY (im not sure) be used by express vpn use udp packets and the school could have just completely dropped them completely (Most games use udp packets since its faster), or the ip ranges you have been assigned on expressvpn may have just been blocked from the school wifi. As for why the cheap free vpn may be able to bypass your school wifi, it could be that it avoids the reasons above OR its something different like a proxy, which is what I use to bypass the restrictions at my high school. The fix, or what I do, is I setup my own servers. The price of a vps server at digital ocean is like 4 dollars a month, probably around the same price if not cheaper than expressvpn. Get yourself one, setup your own proxy server and connect to that. You can search around for tutorials, but the one I use is VMESS+TCP, essentially disguising the proxy traffic as a tcp packet so that the school can't distinguish it from regular traffic. Find a tutorial online, probably ask around on here: https://github.com/net4people/bbs If you followed a guide and still can't get it to work, your gna have to find an unblocked port. I would try 443 or 123 first since usually those aren't blocked but for my school 3478 is the one that works.