Archy

There is an interview with the founder on one of the Privacy podcasts. You can form your opinion. My opinion - yes, they are trustworthy and you can do with them anything that you can with any Linux box, alternatively flash a clean OpenWRT for extra paranoia

Signatures are different. Uninstall old FDroid version first

I’m not your buddy, bro

look on XDA developers forum for your model. They usually have plenty of alternative ROMs

Using Soundcore with their app and internet access denied. Set up once, deleted the app

I don’t think you pay for the iOS app, only the server portion can be licensed AFAIK

I use FreshRSS - really nice app, using PWA on desktop and a plain bookmark on the tablet

Pro tip #2.
Any time they have your stuff - they will use it (sell it) sooner or later. Zero knowledge is the answer

Not sure about “designed”, maybe evolved to be that way but not designed

It definitely has to be Jellyfin (server) + Finamp (client) + tailscale (mesh VPN)