Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas are usually at the bottom of the rankings when it comes to the metrics you mentioned, especially education. Other southern states aren’t much better.
Seeing as how modern conservatism has become nothing more than a culture war against the things that improve the general well-being of a population, yes it will continue to be that way.
I think live sports is really the only reason most people pay for TV anymore. The rest of the content is available online on one of the 3,000 streaming platforms.
I think I’ve seen news rumors that they’re testing an ad-free YouTube-only plan that doesn’t include YouTube Music. (edit: https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/2/22605455/youtube-premium-lite-pilot-benelux-nordics-experiment-ad-free-subscription)
But the reason you’re seeing $18.99/mo is because of the Apple tax. Go to https://www.youtube.com/premium to see the actual price.
This is one thing that Lemmy REALLY needs to work on. The hobby- and topic-specific communities need to grow. Lemmy is currently dominated by like 5-10 communities, which is fine, but it really falls short of the experience I had on Reddit in that regard.
Just FYI, Tildes is run by one (1) dude with a full time job and a family. From what I read, the guy refers to himself as the God of Tildes or something to that effect which I think tells you everything you need to know about how it’s managed.
Don’t expect it to ever reach the popularity or capacity of Lemmy or Reddit.
I’m getting pretty tired of the obvious “Big tech company bad, Twitter dead, Linux good” bias that Lemmy seems to have. It’s definitely decreased my usage over the last week or two. I guess it kind of comes with the territory given Lemmy is a more complicated platform that will naturally attract more tech-oriented users, but it’s still getting super old seeing the same flavor posts every single day.