To add further context--I'd like to emphasize that an understanding of written Chinese would help with Kanji, but like you said, to a limited extent. When reading Kanji, there are cases where you'd have to be cognizant of Onyomi and Kunyomi (Basically pronunciations rooted in Chinese vs. Japanese). Not as important if you are strictly "reading", I suppose. However, this would also not provide insight when reading Hiragana nor Katakana, how particles are used, rules for conjugation (polite vs. casual, past vs. non-past tense, etc.), further reducing mutual intelligibility. In some cases, Chinese characters may be visually identical to Japanese Kanji, yet have different meanings or applications. Traditional Chinese vs. Simplified Chinese is also a whole other topic.
Examples where there is some similarity:
JP: 走る
EN: Run (verb)
CN: 走路
EN: Walk (verb)
Matching characters, unrelated meaning and application:
JP: 勉強
EN: Study (noun)
CN: 勉強
EN: Reluctantly (adverb)
Furthermore, Chinese uses Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order, whereas Japanese uses Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order. Japanese also regularly uses subject omission, so it's important to consider these things if you're moving from one language to the other. Missing an understanding of these differences could lead to pretty different interpretations of a sentence.
That being said, having a background in Chinese would be more beneficial when picking up Japanese than the other way around, IMO.
To further add onto this, they can be public or private. Public Collections are able to be followed by other users. This would be helpful for increasing discoverability for fellow users and communities/magazines. You can create Private Collections for personalized feeds that you may not want to share, negating the need to create a new account for feeds with a different theme or purpose.
On /kbin, there is a feature called Collections -- you can group similar communities akin to multireddits. These collections can be public or private, and don't need to have an overarching theme. Public collections are pretty handy for discoverability too.
It sounds like you've taken the appropriate precautions. I'm sure others will have better suggestions, but perhaps you can try running a VM for a week or so as if you've made the switch and take note of anything you feel you may be lacking.
If you receive these notifications on mobile, you can use kdeconnect (gsconnect on GNOME) which sends pop up notifications on your desktop from your phone, as a workaround.
Well, if that extends beyond paying to be the default search engine, I'd be happy to take a look at a source if you have one. Changing search engines is also only a matter of a few clicks.
kbin has this -- the feature is called collections. https://kbin.social/magazines/collections
you can make public ones that others can follow, or private ones to make curated feeds for yourself.