A writer lurking.
My absolute favorites to follow are:
The Grayzone - it’s Max Blumenthal’s analysis.
Moon of Alabama - one guy’s perspectives on what to look out for
The Canary - for the UK perspective on its involvement in the world’s affairs.
Unlimited Hangout - a more analytical take on long-term established players.
MintPress News - more about the West’s influence in far-away regions.
And for technology:
Techdirt - Crazy legal proceedings, frivolous lawsuits… at times both sad, and very much hilarious.
The posts with most/least number of comments on top, or bottom (regardless of how many upvotes a post has). …
Flash Mobian (https://mobian-project.org) using Jumpdrive, it would go faster than loading it from an SD card, use a nightly image, as kernel 5.9 significantly improves audio call quality. I have my primary SIM card in the phone since that update landed a few weeks ago.
As for applications, there are a bunch of good ones I use:
I think Fediquest has the right idea here: https://social.matej-lach.me/@MatejLach/103148962181822666, although it seems to be in early stages, building federation first, and the app itself only after (https://github.com/MatejLach/astreams)?
Inventaire.io is a self-hostable catalogue, although regrettably not federated.
utopia p2p
Never heard about utopia p2p in privacy/security circles before, so took a quick look. While the concept does seem interesting to a degree, the group behind it seems to be a private firm registered in the UK from 2015 (though the guy who introduced it in a Medium post doesn’t seem to be a native English speaker at all), rather than to form a more transparent public foundation.
They released Utopia only at the very tail end of 2019. This raises a question in my mind, of whether they have some private funders supporting the, which they don’t want the public to know about…?
Mine have a little bit of a philosophical bent to them, most written in the first half of the last century:
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil - does what we know define us?
The Book of Disquiet - a diary of sorts
Prae, by Miklos Szentkuthy
The Transilvanyan Trilogy by Miklos Banffy
Favourite publisher in this area: Contramundum Press.
Metager.org has decent search results in my experience.
I would say Zrythm for sure (see https://www.zrythm.org/en/download.html), and arguably Ghost (https://ghost.org).