New communities pop up, and older ones that didn't have many posts sometimes get revived. So if I have the time and inclination I look at All after my Subscribed.
I would not argue that it was either good or tasteful, only that it is popular. I think it's horrible, and I love corn, I won't eat canned corn though.
That was previously available in Voyager. Removed or deleted comments could be tapped to show the comment. I really liked that feature as it provided context not only in reference to the thread, but also as to how particular mod/mods worked in the community.
You can also set default browser to 'none' then anytime you tap a link a list of browsers and things like Leon, URL check etc. will pop up. In any case they don't require internet access to work.
They actually did that with the SimplePhone. Last time I looked the pages were down but I know I archived them on the wayback machine.
They made lots of promises, including that a downloadable ROM would be available, the whole thing quickly crashed and burned.
Reddit had some pretty extensive threads about it. The whole thing seemed like a grift (it was) and convinced me to dump all their apps.
Anyway, if this is something you want to do you could check those threads, I know people linked to the phone they were using (from Alibaba) and the source code was on Codeberg iirc.
For me SimpleX does everything I need. Unified push would be nice, and would address battery usage. I don't need or want message sync, so that's not an issue.
They all have tradeoffs, so it's just a matter of your priorities. For instance I'm OK with the higher battery drain because it's not using Google.
It might depend on the specific Android flavor. I tried that on an old phone, and while I could disable the actual Google search (tapping in the search bar did nothing) I could not remove the search bar. I also could not find a way to have it open my preferred search engine.
The red arrow in the photo points to exactly how the two pieces must be aligned