Solid. My backup is a T440p, and behind that a X230, fucking bulletproof.

Ya and fuck printers. Happy Solstice.

Solid.

Fair cop. Keep a weather eye out for better alternatives for the blockers, but as noted the full fat gOS play store and google services are pretty good, and the bootloader gets re-locked, might be worth trying it for a weekend to see how close you get, many people have good experiences, but it’s all down to cases.

It’s a pixel, you’re in c/Privacy for whatever reason, have you considered just putting GrapheneOS on it? All those annoyances go bye bye, you can have a full fat google alternate user and an approximately private main user…

I selfhost it on my laptop, pretty easy, and I always have it just the way I want it. Still pushing shit uphill with the AI crap, but better than any one search engine (it amalgamates many). Relevant to OP I have a large block list enabled, but it’s very much a moving target.

Been happy with FreshRSS for years now (TTRSS before that). One thing that really improves it is RSS-Bridge which turns a lot of non RSS sites into feeds (and a lot of truncated feeds into full ones). It’s also a list of what hackerly types will put effort into getting a feed from, so self-curating in its way. Enjoy…

First see if soulseek meets your needs…