In my university, computers in the public rooms all ran Mint, and we had a working self-hosted mail platform. Here comes Microsoft and in a few months all computers are replaced by Windows machines and the email platform runs on Outlook. My previous university also had the same approach: all Microsoft products. I’d really love to know all the details of those deals. I know they offer scholarships and fund development programs (in exchange they make students dependent / educated only on MS products), but I still feel its a loss of freedom for all our institutions.

Yes! It’s a great thing! The next thing we should aim is to pass laws forcing Government instances (Germany and Netherlands already have) so politicians and institutions use those for their public/social media profiles and abandon X/Twitter/Threads and anything that isn’t decentralized. The mention of Mastodon/Lemmy/Pixelfed in the media (when eg. journalists quote a politician) would attract more users to these platforms. I believe this is truly necessary if we want to keep democracy healthy and have our socials out of the control of crazy billionaires.