In the sense I think you’re asking, never: contributing a fix or an improvement is never a one-and-done, fire it off and forget it edit. Each contribution is a request to open a dialog. Implicit in each pull request are multiple questions, perhaps including “is this a good idea”, and “do you like this attempt to do it”.

If the project maintainer who reviews your PR doesn’t like it, they can expend the effort to try to explain why, and teach you. So try to make their job easier, by opening with a clear explanation of why you’re doing it, and if what you did involved design decisions, why you chose as you did.

I got started with RSS using a TUI program on unix, whose name I forget. But then Google came out with Reader (and Listen for podcasts). When they lost interest and dropped them, I exported my OPML and switched to apps I could find on f-droid. Now I back up my OPML scrupulously and am currently happy with Feeder and Antennapod; Google taught me I didn’t want to depend on someone else’s server for something like this; it’s too important. If ever I find I want some feature that requires a server, I’ll self-host something (Nextcloud?), but I seem to be well enough served by purely local clients.

I really hate video, prefer reading. But by reading the material to a camera, people get paid by youtube, and then set up a patreon for buying access to the material they read. Everybody loses, hooray:-(

when I wanted a lemmy app, searching f-droid only pulled up Jerboa, and I remain happy with it.

Derek Lowe has some explanation:

In The Pipeline

If you skip updates long enough, someone might find a security hole, and if you’ve skipped the update that fixes it, you’ll be able to jailbreak it, install koreader, read epubs without conversion, use the filesystem for ebook organization.

Also, you’ll avoid advertisements, which Amazon is now pushing to the homescreens even of kindles that were bought with the extra-cost no-ads option.

since podcasts are I think just RSS feeds of audio files (mp3 for those I’ve checked) the ads aren’t in any way marked in the stream. The only thing I’ve found is adjusting the skip buttons in antennapod so that skip fwd does 10 seconds, and back does 5; that seems to let me avoid listening to most of the ad; tap fwd until it’s back in material, then back once.

But I listen to a lot less podcasts; if I want hands- and eyes-free material I’m more likely to use TTS in my (text) RSS feed reader of choice, currently Feeder.

Kindle isn’t based on Android; it’s bare Linux with heavy DRM and a very limited ebook reader app on it. Whether the MacOS kindle app would help, I don’t know.

That looks like an app for playing audiobooks; I’ve used Voice Audiobook Player from f-droid for that.

If what you want is the recorded performance of someone reading a book, then yeah, librivox for legal audiobooks, and other commentors have other amswers that are on-topic. But DRM-free ebooks — text things, like epubs — can be read aloud by good ereader apps. I like Moon+ Reader Pro from Google Play, and Cool Reader from f-droid. For me, the emotionless robotic reading of TTS engines is more like a hands- and eyes-free way to enjoy the author’s words as written; I find listening to someone performing an audio reading of the book a different experience.

Before ebook reader apps learned about TTS I used to take my txt ebooks, feed them through flite (Festival Lite), then convert the resulting audio to ogg vorbis and load them on an iRiver PMP to play during long drives.

after Google shut down Reader, I took my OPML (list of subscriptions), and switched to a FOSS local RSS reader; import my OPML and carry on. I’ve switched software occasionally; right now I’m happy with Feeder (from f-droid).

Getting my news is something I care about too much to entrust to someone’s server; I’m happy with it purely local.

It’s not GUI (no icons, no widgets) but I have for many years preferred

Search Based Launcher (Minimalistic home-screen) https://f-droid.org/packages/com.vackosar.searchbasedlauncher/

It uses the text names of apps for launching them, and allows both hiding and renaming apps. Renaming is helpful for dealing with e.g. “Voice” being both Google Voice and Voice Audiobook Player.