the internet in general kind of sucks these days. Reddit has burned down a lot of the things that made its search results so useful in the past. Every forum post more than a few years old is a forest of broken links; the top of basically any internet search whatsoever is an ocean of SEO spam. And that’s before you get into the sheer amount of information that isn’t searcheable at all because it’s on platforms like discord.
I’ll tell you why I haven’t deleted reddit – aside from tech-heavy discussion here (Linux, Reddit, tech generally, that sort of thing), there isn’t a fediverse equivalent to things like the sports or food subreddits I follow.
I agree iscussions on lemmy are higher-quality and friendlier, for sure. But for a lot of the things I use reddit for they just don’t really exist here yet.
SSDs are very cheap these days
I’ve been very happy with Pocket Casts. Their subscription is pretty cheap (not one-time though, unfortunately), and it has automatic sync between the android and desktop apps.
the thing is, this is an awful strategy for getting people onto a platform. The reason for reddit’s success was that there were forums for pretty much anything you could think of centralized in one place.
99.9% of people don’t care that much about which app, which instance, which server, whatever, they’re just there for the content. The fact that so many reddit users are up in arms about it is a legacy from when it was a much more niche platform than it is today. But in general, this confusing mess of federation, moderation philosophies, defederation, it doesn’t matter which instance you choose because they federate, but actually it does matter because some of them don’t, a wall of text needed to explain what happens when the mods of two different servers have a disagreement and how the federation protocol works, it’s just not a good strategy for getting people onto the platform.
Yep, this is it. I volunteered for my school’s IT department in high school, this was basically the logic. The laptops are cheap and easy to manage/administrate. Whether or not they were Linux was a non-issue.
Edit: also, since chromeOS is basically just a browser, there wasn’t much that could break, and if something did break everything was stored in google drive anyway, so you could just factory reset the device and hand it back to the student without needing to buy any kind of higher-level support contract.