If you have an email workflow that you like then something like rss2email might be an option. You simply feed your incoming rss into your email. You'll want to auto-tag (or otherwise organize) these emails to keep them separate from regular emails. Then you use your usual email tools to organize them further.
I've been using such a setup for the past 15 years.
I've done many hours of phonecalls on mine. Mic quality is acceptable, slightly mushy. Wind is an issue for example when riding a bike at higher speeds. Wearing a hoodie over them can block the mic too.
I've been using various Aftershokz/Shokz models for many years and well over a thousand hours. They are a great option for speech-focused contents like podcasts, audiobooks and that's what I use them for. I almost never use them for music, the lack of bass (even with earplugs) just doesn't do it for me. But I don't find any earbuds satisfactory for music either so maybe I am more picky than most.
I agree with OP about the controls. They are workable but could be much better even considering the limited inputs. I particularly hate the choice of triple-click for backwards-seek and I mess up the timing half the time. Another pet-peeve is the loud beep on play/pause that cannot be turned off. Using the phone/computer controls instead of the on-device ones avoid these issues.
As far as models I originally got the Aeropex and later on "downgraded" to the OpenMove. The audio quality is comparable between the two, the only thing you are missing with the lower end model is comfort - but that is highly subjective! I actually prefer the way the OpenMove feels.
I really wish that there was more competition in this space. The Shokz products are a bit overpriced and slow to evolve and the rest of the options I've seen seems lower quality and worse form factor. Would love to hear if anybody has found a different brand that they prefer over the Shokz models.
SearXNG is great at what it does but it falls into the Bing/Google/etc-frontend category since it just forwards your query to one of the search engines it has modules for. It doesn't have its own crawl and index.
I wish that was the case but sadly most of them are basically Bing or Google frontends or belong to entities that I trust even less. As far as I can tell there are very few independent crawls out there.
Costs a lot less than therapy too.
How visible is this to the average user? Just wondering because I have yet to see any spam at all in my Mastodon feeds. Big thanks to the admins for being on top of it!
If you care about privacy, which I understand, you probably want to leave quickly.
Just because you care about privacy it doesn't mean that you have to stay indoors all the time. You can still hang around on the town square you just have to be conscious about what you do where.
A big part of caring about privacy is understanding how the platforms you use work and using them accordingly. With proprietary platforms this is often opaque and the rules can change. Open platforms are transparent and you can actually understand them - if you make the effort.
gotosocial might we worth checking out. It provides Mastodon-compatible APIs (so you can run Mastodon clients and UIs against it) but it's less resource hungry and easier to deploy (in my experience). The caveat is that it's less mature.
Any naming convention is fine as long as it's meaningful to you. But it's a good idea to keep your own repos separate from the random ones you clone from the internet.