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 don’t follow it very closely, but as far as I know, they are the only one implementing the open protocol they designed (which doesn’t interoperate with ActivityPub). However, there seems to be some efforts for creating a bridge: https://www.docs.bsky.app/blog/feature-bridgyfed

As you said, there are some recognizable faces and that may impact the adoption. But not being compatible with ActivityPub is a real bummer.

I believe there is already a browser add on for this. Cannot remember the name right now.

Edit: I think this should be in Lemmy core.

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.

!learn_programming@programming.dev

I think you have a better chance if your instance focuses on a topic instead of being general purpose. That’s the reason I chose programming.dev. All communities there are related to programming so when I sort by “local” I see something interesting even though I haven’t subscribed to that community. And that increases my interaction with those communities.

Would love to see a browser based implementation of this.

Here is another implementation: Another Blog Resurrection, the Fediverse, and a New Comment System

https://www.overheid.nl/english

Overheid.nl is the central access point to all information about government organisations of the Netherlands.

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