I know you said “self hosted”, but if you are interested in an Android app, Google Play Books does most of what you want, I think. You can upload your books, and read them on any device (with offline capabilities). But this is the Self Hosted community, so I will show myself out.

I would add Ars Technica to that list and call it a day.

For programming I follow YouTube channels of the conferences relevant for my tech stack (YouTube natively supports RSS). They are generally 1 hour talks but it’s a great way to stay up to date.

Did you take a look at write freely or other blogging software with native ActivityPub support?

In programming.dev you can find the following:

• https://programming.dev/c/data_engineering
• https://programming.dev/c/sql
• https://programming.dev/c/postgresql

You can also request communities in https://programming.dev/c/community_request

I use InoReader. Most of the sources I want/need has RSS feeds. For the rest I create feeds using Feed43. I use it daily and that’s how I get news, YouTube videos, Twitter feeds (via Nitter), Reddit/Lemmy posts.

I was upset when Reader was killed. But looking back and seeing what Google has become over time, I think it was for the best. Now we have entire companies that only do one thing: RSS, and they are good at it. If Reader was still a thing, I’m afraid it would have extinguished RSS.

Names matter, and Reader told everyone that it was for reading when it could have been for so much more. “If Google made the iPod,” he says, “they would have called it the Google Hardware MP3 Player For Music, you know?”

This is funny, but I think Reader was a good name. At least it reflected what I want to do with the product.