I'd say keeping up with the reddit LocalLLama community is the "easiest" way and it's by no means easy.
The subreddit is… not great. It’s a decent way of keeping up, but don’t read the posts too much (and even then, there is a heavy social aspect, and the models that are discussed there are a very specific subset of what’s available). There is a lot of groupthink, the discussions are never rigorous. Most of the posts are along the lines of “I tested a benchmark and it is 0.5 points ahead of Llama-whatever on that one benchmark I made up, therefore it’s the dog’s and everything else is shite”. The Zuckerberg worshiping is also disconcerting. Returns diminish quickly as you spend more time on that subreddit.