I write a tech blog on Gemini ( https://geminiprotocol.net/) , and read other people’s blogs from the Antenna aggregator on that network . IRC is still quite active for some topics, again on the tech theme libera.chat is the place to go now.

Same answer as last time this was asked, I am very happy with Posteo.

Posteo. Happy with them. For client, gnus in Emacs. Have it configured to do Autocrypt too, but almost nobody else on the planet does 🙁

archive.org is great for borrowing old books, that you probably can’t get your hands on otherwise. Just need a bit of research following references to find titles to search for.