I recently moved from Pocket to Instapaper because of the way Pocket seems to be adding all these things to get in your way.

I dislike Instapaper too because of the whole GDPR thing.

I should engineer a solution I like, but could do with some help generating text from the articles. What is the best way of doing that? Something like Mozilla Fathom?

https://github.com/buriy/python-readability

https://github.com/goose3/goose3

https://github.com/codelucas/newspaper

For a complete solution, you can also look at Wallabag, which can be self-hosted.